40 Quotes by Kristen Henderson

Time’s relativity is considered and abandoned, for the more revelatory experiences of starlightin strands, and pearly floors that span as far as absolute compassion...

Even the bees I'd swear were sent to protect us in the delicate business of hives and honey are stung to silence by the news that something winged has lost its flight.

I dream for an absentee and oft maligned device—the accident-maker, the soul-taker, my camera; its factory guaranteedthird eye, without which I am duly dimand memory denied. No picturesfor my contrived Arbus to declare, excepting some stitch of Sextonmanages these sentences of despair.

It was as if someone had leftthe bird thereas a kind of telegramof feathers, oily feathersthat looked like they’d struggled,shuttered a little before letting gointo flightforever.

And the sculptors will shape the soil for the writers to stretch the seedsfor the patient painters who sketch the petals they will shade in alabaster and gold. Their sweat is the rain. Maybe the jazzman will send us a rose.

As a woman still,without the right kind of mouth,my tongue’s of no use.

Oblong stones sink slow and sideways. Shaped by the weight of waves,dutifully vibrating nature’s lunar-bound graces, they wash ashore only for closed palms to forsake them. The cheerful will cherish them, place themon windowsills, or on graves.

Such is a communityof inviolable immunity, protectedfrom tampering or harpooningmutiny. Every better thinker’s impulse to shrink us (at the shoreline from our lifeblood’s deep pulse) uses disparaging scrutiny to sink us.

How long before the eaves gave wayto the sky, or the bathroom floor was jack-hammered to bone,while the trees outside were leftto redirect the wind?How quickly the den must have become more kitchenand bedrooms lost their privacy. I see the bookswe’d packed up and moved years ago under a pile of fresh rubble, still sending off dust—titles stunned to a babblein gold leaf.