Megan Falley > Quotes

“you were last seen walking through a field of pianos. no. a museum of mouths. in the kitchen of a bustling restaurant, cracking eggs and releasing doves. no. eating glow worms and waltzing past my bedroom. last seen riding the subway, literally, straddling its metal back, clutching electrical cables as reins. you were wearing a dress made out of envelopes and stamps, this was how you travelled. i was the mannequin in the storefront window you could have sworn moved. the library card in the book you were reading until that dog trotted up and licked your face. the cookie with two fortunes. the one jamming herself through the paper shredder, afraid to talk to you. the beggar, hat outstretched bumming for more minutes. the phone number on the bathroom stall with no agenda other than a good time. the good time is a picnic on water, or a movie theatre that only plays your childhood home videos and no one hushes when you talk through them. when they play my videos i throw milk duds at the screen during the scenes i watch myself letting you go – lost to the other side of an elevator – your face switching to someone else’s with the swish of a geisha’s fan. my father could have been a travelling salesman. i could have been born on any doorstep. there are 2,469,501 cities in this world, and a lot of doorsteps. meet me on the boardwalk. i’ll be sure to wear my eyes. do not forget your face. i could never.”
― Megan Falley

“I want to live in an honest house
where the motion detector is so sharp
it knows when my thoughts leave the room.

I want a clap on lamp that works as a polygraph;
when you swear you still love me, the lights flicker.”
― Megan Falley

“Whoever first said that poetry is dead failed to provide the autopsy. If poetry is dead, what a rowdy and glorious ghost. Poetry haunts. Poetry permeates the walls we put up. Poetry startles us awake and into our own aliveness. Poetry rustles the hairs on the backs of our necks and chases us into more compassionate rooms. Though it is difficult to change a stubborn mind, poetry can change our hearts in an instant.”
― Megan Falley, How Poetry Can Change Your Heart

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” —Henry David Thoreau”
― Megan Falley, After the Witch Hunt: A Collection of Poetry

“The way you'd say my name like it was the medicine and the fever.”
― Megan Falley, Drive Here and Devastate Me

“The poet Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz advises that if you’ve told a story more than three times in your life, it should be a poem.”
― Megan Falley, How Poetry Can Change Your Heart

“Poetry has played a part in nearly every revolution in history. Political poems have been hollered at rallies, at protests, at pride events, in prisons, in treatment centers, in colleges, in churches, and more. You could even argue that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech was itself a poem, as he undoubtedly used poetic device to heighten his message and captivate listeners:”
― Megan Falley, How Poetry Can Change Your Heart

“There isn’t anyone in the world who doesn’t write things that don’t suck ever. Your favorite poet has awful drafts and bizarre metaphors too. They just don’t publish those, so we don’t see them, and then we put the poet on this writerly pedestal of not-sucking.”
― Megan Falley, How Poetry Can Change Your Heart

“Poetry is the pen-and-paper version of paying wondrous attention.”
― Megan Falley, How Poetry Can Change Your Heart

“you can pen. You can paper.
You can write and write and write and write until you break
your hand. Then, you can become
ambidextrous.”
― Megan Falley, Drive Here and Devastate Me

“Poems can uncover our own dusty griefs. They can enrage us into action, or encourage us to shout our aching into megaphones at protests and rallies. But that doesn’t mean the same poems can’t also make you happy.”
― Megan Falley, How Poetry Can Change Your Heart

“I decided my voice box was someone else’s to open. The ballerina inside it, dancing for someone else’s song.”
― Megan Falley, Drive Here and Devastate Me

“I would have become the tree, stuck a spigot in me, asked, You’re thirsty, my love? Then drink.”
― Megan Falley, Drive Here and Devastate Me

“There is poetry in the noticing. In allowing your mouth to hang open in the presence of everyday magic.”
― Megan Falley, How Poetry Can Change Your Heart

“Everyone wants to give a writer the perfect notebook. Over the years I’ve acquired stacks: one is leather, a rope of Rapunzel’s hair braids its spine. Another is tree-friendly, its paper reincarnated from diaries of poets now graying in cubicles. One is small and black as a funeral dress, its pages lined like the hands of a widow. There’s even a furry blue one that looks like a shag rug or a monster that would hide beneath it—and I wonder why? For every blown-out candle, every Mazel Tov, every turn of the tassel, we are handed what a writer dreads most: blank pages. It’s never a notebook we need. If we have a story to tell, an idea carbonating past the brim of us, we will write it on our arms, thighs, any bare meadow of skin. In the absence of pens, we repeat our lines deliriously like the telephone number of a parting stranger until we become the craziest one on the subway. If you really love a writer, fuck her on a coffee table. Find a gravestone of someone who shares her name and take her to it. When her door is plastered with an eviction notice, do not offer your home. Say I Love You, then call her the wrong name. If you really love a writer, bury her in all your awful and watch as she scrawls her way out.”
― Megan Falley, After the Witch Hunt: A Collection of Poetry

“People’s minds aren’t often changed quickly or easily, but people’s hearts can be changed in an instant, and therein lies the power of poetry to change the world.”
― Megan Falley, How Poetry Can Change Your Heart

“Hate thrives in the presence of ignorance, and many poems are an education. Poetry is the anti-bomb, the anti-border. And, in a world where there is so much destruction, creation itself is medicine.”
― Megan Falley, How Poetry Can Change Your Heart

“It is only September.
I don't know many seasons I will be allowed to love you yet.”
― Megan Falley

“Whoever first said that poetry is dead failed to provide the autopsy. If poetry is dead, what a rowdy and glorious ghost.”
― Megan Falley, How Poetry Can Change Your Heart