Beth Morey Quotes

#1. she prays to feel as powerful
as she might if God sang silent
words into her ear and answered
all the rattling questions
now

Beth Morey

#2. I wonder what freezes
the flurry of hurt on her cold-
flushed cheeks, if his touch is
a salve or the shattering.

Beth Morey

#3. God,
is there no faith left?
He has not told. I
would not know Him if I saw Him.

Beth Morey

#4. I am at the gates of my own destruction.

(Or so I'm told.)

Beth Morey

#5. i feel the spring breeze ruffling
the new-hatched damp of my unfurling
feathers; i see with eyes bleary from egg-dark
the shell clinging sticky to my screaming
beak.

Beth Morey

#6. absence
looks like a lake bed flooded with sky
sounds like cotton howling
tastes like tear-stained pillows
smells like churning bile and burnt hair
feels like screaming agony, my heart dying and dying

Beth Morey

#7. we have forgotten what night tastes like,
salted by full moon silver rupturing
the dark. we have forgotten how the skin
sings when the lunar fervor unfurls
across its follicles.

Beth Morey

#8. we have forgotten that we were born
of celestial cataclysm.

we have forgotten how to dance
bare-footed on the earth to the cadence
of our souls. we have forgotten the ritual
fires and the acrid tang of holy smoke
on our tongues.

Beth Morey

#9. the mind is a treasure
trove, an almanac, a tomb.

Beth Morey

#10. you say
we were never
meant for this vowed life,
golden bands of only us, and death
do us part. you
say love like it's held in quotation marks,
that this union soured before
it started.

Beth Morey

#11. we have forgotten how to press our fingers
to the tilting planet's jugular and measure
her pulse. we have forgotten symbiosis,
that she is our mother.

we have forgotten that when we rape
our world we rape ourselves.

Beth Morey