Rachel Zucker > Quotes

“a woman with young children is not a woman but a mammal, salve, croon, water carrier”
― Rachel Zucker

“as I travel the city / hating poetry & my haircut & all the things I do not / want to do”
― Rachel Zucker, The Pedestrians

“I have no lover, not even my love.
I have no other, not even I.”
― Rachel Zucker

“Even if a poem is beautiful and memorable, it’s not like an advertising jingle or propaganda, which attempt to convince and control. Poems seek to confuse, disabuse, enlarge understanding, and make people ask questions and think for themselves.”
― Rachel Zucker

“Anyway,
if my lips were rose petals they’d taste too bitter.
If my cheeks were apples they’d crawl with apple worms.
If my eyes were stars they’d be dead by the time you saw them.
If I moved you like the moon I’d disappear once a month.
If my teeth were Chiclets you’d want to chew on them and spit them out.
If my hands were birds you couldn’t hold them; they’d peck you bloody.
Is my skin alabaster? Then it’s cold and hard and one day someone will skin me,
make me into a cold hard box tinged with pink or yellow, to hold unguents, then
how will you love me?
If my vagina is a cool, dark forest you’ll certainly be lost, you have no sense of direction.
If my vagina is a cave-watch out! It’s prone to seismic shifts and avalanche.
If my vagina is a river of honey: orange, lavender, fine herbs, hazelnut, all too sweet.
If my ears are shells I can’t hear you, only the ocean anyway.
And if my voice is music, it is unintelligible.
Don’t say anything.
I am not a flower, but a body with rules and predictable, cellular qualities.
My eyelashes and fingernails and skin and spit are organized by proteins
designed to erode at a pre-encoded date and time, no matter what you do or do
not do to me-
I am remarkably like an animal.
More like a heifer than a sunrise, I want to bite, stroke, swallow you so stop lying
there trying to think of something to say and trying to understand me.
I am the body next to but unlike yours.
You already know me. You already know what I’m made of.”
― Rachel Zucker

“

Letter [December to Persephone]

Am I the only one to notice the soft layer of haze above snow?

You say you see butterflies in the skeleton pelvis, well,
what about the larger hand of the clock?
Or a cauldron for boiling water?

Did you, do you ever stop falling?"

                                 I repeat your name
                                       a word

                                    it almost means
                                        nothing

Do you remember encyclopedias?
I piled up the books so you could reach the table.

Now the only way to recall you is the shape
of your walking away.

”
― Rachel Zucker, Eating in the Underworld

“The online tarot reading says she already has everything she needs.

So, she gets quiet. When the phone rings she doesn't answer it. She makes a list of the things she thinks she lacks but might require: the ability to draw, a career as a singer . . .

The list or the making of the list is unendurable.”
― Rachel Zucker, The Pedestrians

“That a dream is not reason to evacuate.”
― Rachel Zucker

“To be against the confessional is to be against writing about women and women’s bodies, people of color and the bodies of people of color, queerness, trans bodies, differently abled bodies, individuality, oppression, perversity, diversity, class, the domestic, the non-normative, the personal, the political, the specific, the urgent, the spiritual, the banal, the direct, the relational, the screamed, the whispered. To be against the confessional is to be against coming out, against emphatically bringing the unwanted and repressed and hated and oppressed into the public view, into the poem. “Poetry,” wrote Audre Lorde, “is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”
― Rachel Zucker, The Poetics of Wrongness