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1 " The ocean-blue bowl won’t refuse to bruise, won’t hold it back from the gaping earth-wounds.There will still come water, chill wind and happy goosebumps, and in the utmost corners of oaks, leaves laughing. "
― Bryana Joy , Having Decided To Stay
2 " I too was pinched off from a piece of clay, I too modeled by omnipotence and flankedby things too wonderful for me "
3 " Friend who has fired the kingfishers and flamed the dragonflies – they catch your light however they move and beam it out of their eyes. "
4 " It is something to have gazed on the constellated white, felt it running from the eyes and the pores: the salt of love. It is something to have whispered wild thank-yous in the only ways we know how. "
5 " Never say savor when you only mean taste – one is a holding on the tongue and an intoxication and the other is cursory, a sampling, connoting reluctance to bask. Never say a thing you don’t mean. "
6 " I scratch down happiness, Iwant my ink to do happy dances, to careen across the pages staggeringlike a drunken fellow, giddy on moonshine or sunset. "
7 " FAIRY-TALE Suppose they really did live happily ever after. Suppose Cinderella was a good wife – and she could have been. I daresay she was reticent, timid, not one to make a fuss, or rock the boat, accustomed to orders and quiet in company. Suppose he was a good husband, the haughty prince, coddled from the cradle up. He might have pulled it off. He was in love after all, and love covers a multitude of offenses. Perhaps it wrapped up her social poverty and rough edges and lack of table manners in velvet and smoothed everything and the royal lovebirds got along just fine after all. Suppose that Belle forgot the beast-horns, the stamped image of his face framed with fur. Suppose she one day wrapped around his neck and felt only man-flesh there. Suppose Snow White stopped having nightmares about old women peddling apples, hook-nosed, cloaked, warted and long-fingered on her doorstep in the dusk. Suppose her prince one day learned to sleep the nights through, his fingers in her hair, no fear of jerking eyes wide to her screaming. I retain my right to believe in happy endings. "
― Bryana Joy , Having Decided To Stay: Collected Poems
8 " Yet it is not you who need upholding. But us, and if we misplace our pamphlets, disorder the shelf, you never have trouble explaining yourself. "
