"What can I do with this memory? Shake the bones out of it? Defoliate the smile? Stub out the chin with cigarettes? Take the face of the man I love and squeeze my foot into it, when all the while my heart is making a museum? I love you the way the oboe plays. I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feel. I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes. Yet I fear you, as one in the desert fears the sun."
Anne Sexton was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Her poetry details her long battle with bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies, and intimate details from her private life, including relationships with her husband and children, whom one daughter later alleged she had physically and sexually ab
"With a tongue like a razor he will kiss the mother, the child, and we three will color the stars black in memory of his mother who kept him chained to the food tree or turned him on and off like a water faucet and made women through all these hazy years the enemy with a heart of lies."
"Earth, earth riding your merry-go-round toward extinction, right to the roots thickening the oceans like gravy, festering in your caves, you are becoming a latrine."
"Love your selfs self where it lives. There is no special God to refer to; or if there is, why did I let you grow in another place. You did not know my voice when I came back to call. All the superlatives of tomorrows white tree and mistletoe will not help you know the holidays you had to miss."
"Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane."
"I imitate a memory of belief that I do not own."
"I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind."