Stephanie Hemphill Quotes

#1. Inside a book, she captures all that's lost. She journals so her words won't fly away.

Stephanie Hemphill

#2. Give me the strength to leaf, for I fear otherwise we may hang ourselves.

Stephanie Hemphill

#3. The trees' bare bony fingers
point crookedly
towards Heaven or Hell
or worse than that, towards nowhere.

Stephanie Hemphill

#4. Why uproot
a perfectly healthy
white blazing star
from the soil
to allow room
for a roadside weed?

Stephanie Hemphill

#5. I cannot be assured of
exactly what I created
be it madness and monster
or beauty and light.

Stephanie Hemphill

#6. We built a world of words
and yet none satisfy now.

Stephanie Hemphill

#7. I fret for Sylvia.
She appears anchored
to the idea of sinking,
which is silly when she so clearly
soars above almost everyone.

Stephanie Hemphill

#8. All you know is
you must change sail
to catch it.

Stephanie Hemphill

#9. She said the night was March and black
and that the hill where he kissed her
and enveloped her in his arms
was a sea of grass and she rooted
to the ground like a sapling,
like it was natural and yet
all created for her moment of romance.

Stephanie Hemphill

#10. She breaks. She's sick. Throw a rope, a net. She falls like a shot-up plane. Help her find the landing strip, Her feet are wet - She'll learn, she'll train. She walks a rope on fire, Look Ma, no hands.

Stephanie Hemphill

#11. Learning to be a lady / is like learning / to live within a shell, / to be a crustacean encased / in a small white / uncomfortable world.

Stephanie Hemphill

#12. It may be safe to walk,
but where do you go
when all directions wear
the same black ashen despair?

Stephanie Hemphill

#13. I see my future
now not as something
intangible like a dream,
but like a boat
meeting land
after time spent at sea,
a destination I will reach.

Stephanie Hemphill

#14. If I were a man
I might not wear the cloak
of anonymity.

Stephanie Hemphill

#15. The tides here are too rough. I sink here, happy only when I hoard my little blue sleeping pills, stash the blades of my razor. I accumulate a drawer of drop-out devices, so by December I can escape to a Merry Christmas.

Stephanie Hemphill