1.
And now the question: what do we do with the longing
for what can destroy us?
Mary Jo Bang
2.
Why are you not where you belong? / A black hat on a hook says nothing. / Ashes mirror ashes / In a mirroring window.
Mary Jo Bang
3.
I say every dog looks like no other
but that isn't true. Not entirely.
Difference is slippery.
Mary Jo Bang
4.
A child, then a man, now a feather / Passing through a furious fire / Called time.
Mary Jo Bang
5.
The wheel begins its only if turning. / It had never stopped. / This is life's bargain that motion / Is hope.
Mary Jo Bang
6.
What is desire but the hard wire argument given to the mind's unstoppable mouth
Mary Jo Bang
7.
To say you loved a person. / To say that person no longer exists. / A tragic flawed fate going on and on and on.
Mary Jo Bang
8.
You are reduced / To the after-sorrow / That will last my lifetime. The hair-tearing / Grief of the mother / Whose child has been swept away.
Mary Jo Bang
9.
Bertrand Russell said, 'Electricity is not a thing like St. Paul's Cathedral; it is a way in which things behave.' And it's not 'they' who say, but Walter Benjamin who said, 'Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness, with the base and the banal.' In September, 1940, Benjamin died under ambiguous circumstances in the French-Spanish border town of Portbou, while attempting to flee the Nazis.
Mary Jo Bang
