Jalina Mhyana Quotes

#1. It dawns on me that maybe I'm just terrifically lazy; that I might be appropriating other people's invisible sicknesses and disorders and scribbling them on the clipboard at the end of my bed to fool the nurses; so I can indulge in rest cures all day, every day. That I'm even fooling myself.

Jalina Mhyana

#2. I can't pray or weigh my words right; doomsday
is here my friend, but you're immune. We suffer
for you. I'm weaving crowns of sonnets, dreads;
a souvenir so you'll never forget your friends.

Jalina Mhyana

#3. I was his "little girl with the William Burroughs mind," his "secret fairy," "female Frank Zappa" and "window onto a magical world." He said I fell to earth, leaving wing-marks on the ceilings of our dreams.

Jalina Mhyana

#4. We could scan each car for terrorists

and lovers she could lean into

my camouflage her head resting on woven trees.

When they come for her body she could run deep
into my uniform

into the forest of me
where they could never find her.

Jalina Mhyana

#5. Offerings gleam beneath consecrated trees,
boulders, and caves where Kami nature spirits
minister to congregations of saki cans, lotus root,
and the glow of tangerines; still-lives silent as prayer.

Jalina Mhyana

#6. We played with the moon all night, painting faces on its blank cheek, shining its spotlight into sleeping people's windows. But mostly we just ate the moon, stuck tongues to its surface and felt it dissolve, left chunks of its minty scalp on neighbors' doorsteps.

Jalina Mhyana

#7. Veins of ivy scale stones,
find footholds but
the caretaker cuts
earth short, peels
creepers from Cotswold
rock and props the dead
head to head so they won't
topple like drunks
on their moss-soft shadows.

Jalina Mhyana

#8. Everything was numbered: the lenses, the painterly sky, the milligrams of my panic pills. I had prescription eyes that allowed me to see better, and prescription panic pills that allowed me to play blind.

Jalina Mhyana