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Despite my asbestos gloves, the cough is filling me with black, and a red powder seeps through my veins.

Anne Sexton

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Anne Sexton
Age: 45 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 9
Died: 1974
Died: October 4
Poet
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Anne Gray Harvey
Fire
Cough
Black
Powder
Gloves
Veins
Filling
Burning
Red
Asbestos
Despite
Seeps

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And thus Snow White became the prince's bride. The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast and when she arrived there were red-hot iron shoes, in the manner of red-hot roller skates, clamped upon her feet.
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Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.
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The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards.
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I have forgiven all the old actors for dying. A new one comes on with the same lines, like large white growths, in his mouth. The dancers come on from the wings, perfectly mated.
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Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
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I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
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being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions
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I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.
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Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.
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God is only mocked by believers.
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I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.
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The fish are naked. The fish are always awake. They are the color of old spoons and caramels.
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I suffer for birds and fireflies but not frogs, she said, and threw him across the room. Kaboom! Like a genie out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of the bedroom.
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It's a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.
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Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.
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Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.
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Someone is dead. Even the trees know it, those poor old dancers who come on lewdly, all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.
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I remember the stink of the liverwurst. How I was put on a platter and laid between the mayonnaise and the bacon. The rhythm of the refrigerator had been disturbed.
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I who was a house full of bowel movement, I who was a defaced altar, I who wanted to crawl toward God could not move nor eat bread.
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My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It was hard. It was made of stone. It covered my face like a mask. But it has cracked.
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