Drum Machine
Kristen Henderson
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Would it be enough to rock on a stormless sea with each our separate memories tuned to the state of the sinking sun?”
“there’s no way I can sleep in any position with so much still unwritten about the glory of basements, where, with all the promise in crock pot boxes, small animals go to die, piles of laundry hide the machines, rusted tools fall into other rusted tools giving way to unsung sculpture, soiled playing cards and unmatched socks strewn atop a punched-out screen door make a shaggy parquet; and a famished, leggy fluorescent tube barely winks on the entire scene.”
“It was as if someone had left the bird there as a kind of telegram of feathers, oily feathers that looked like they’d struggled, shuttered a little before letting go into flight forever.”
“I tell you once and for all— in front of the angel pictures on the wall, that I am not a host to load-bearing ghosts or heady entities, and if I was ever holy, I have fallen far into the dense atmosphere of the living.”
“How long before the eaves gave way to the sky, or the bathroom floor was jack-hammered to bone, while the trees outside were left to redirect the wind? How quickly the den must have become more kitchen and bedrooms lost their privacy. I see the books we’d packed up and moved years ago under a pile of fresh rubble, still sending off dust— titles stunned to a babble in gold leaf.”
“Even the bees I'd swear were sent to protect us in the delicate business of hives and honey are stung to silence by the news that something winged has lost its flight.”
“Dear Anonymous, I've got a secret I know you can keep it because you don't really exist.... This is what shapes you, this is what makes you as authentic as you are fake.”
“And the sculptors will shape the soil for the writers to stretch the seeds for the patient painters who sketch the petals they will shade in alabaster and gold. Their sweat is the rain. Maybe the jazzman will send us a rose.”
“...you hold a poem that functions half as personal note and half as telescope to the heights awaiting us all.”
“what if there was an uncanny moment when all the birds were grounded from Cape Town to Juneau, and everywhere between--all feathers frozen in a universal stutter, so quick as to make a snail of light, and even Stephen Hawking's mind would miss it?”
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Book Keywords:
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