Kim Addonizio > Quotes

“. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.”
― Kim Addonizio

“Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road
late at night.”
― Kim Addonizio

“What Do Women Want?"

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.”
― Kim Addonizio

“Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

“Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
Give me the lover who yanks open the door
of his house and presses me to the wall
in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I’m drenched
and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
and begin their delicious diaspora
through the cities and small towns of my body.
To hell with the saints, with martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
I want this world. I want to walk into
the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
like I’m nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
and I want to resist it. I want to go
staggering and flailing my way
through the bars and back rooms,
through the gleaming hotels and weedy
lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
where dogs are let off their leashes
in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
other and roll together in the grass, I want to
lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again
and put on that little black dress and wait
for you, yes you, to come over here
and get down on your knees and tell me
just how fucking good I look.
- “For Desire”
― Kim Addonizio

“Love's merciless, the way it travels in and keeps emitting light.”
― Kim Addonizio, What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems

“Out there people are working and arguing and laughing, living their beautiful, terrible lives, falling in love and having babies and being bored out of their skulls and feeling depressed, then being consoled by some little thing like watching the patterns the light makes through the leaves of trees, casting shadows on the sidewalks.
I remember the line from that poem now.
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.”
― Kim Addonizio, Little Beauties

“يقول مارك إن العذاب، وإن لم نره،
له صوت ما،
ضوضاء مكتومة ناعمة
لا صلة لها بالصراخ
الذى قد يتبادر إلى أذهاننا،
بل هو أقرب إلى حفيف قبعة
يرفعها رجل صامت
وهو يفسح الطريق
لامرأة جميلة قد لامس فستانها معطفه
من دون أن تراه.”
― Kim Addonizio

“For You"

For you I undress down to the sheaths of my nerves.
I remove my jewelry and set it on the nightstand,
I unhook my ribs, spread my lungs flat on a chair.
I dissolve like a remedy in water, in wine.
I spill without staining, and leave without stirring the air.
I do it for love. For love, I disappear.”
― Kim Addonizio, Lucifer at the Starlite: Poems

“Like That"

Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road late at night, with no
moon and no town anywhere
and a large hungry animal moving heavily through the brush in
the ditch.
Love me with a blindfold over your eyes and the sound of rusty
water
blurting from the faucet in the kitchen, leaking down through
the floorboards to hot cement. Do it without asking,
without wondering or thinking anything, while the machinery’s
shut down and the watchman’s slumped asleep before his small TV
showing the empty garage, the deserted hallways, while the thieves
slice through
the fence with steel clippers. Love me when you can’t find
a decent restaurant open anywhere, when you’re alone in a glaring
diner
with two nuns arguing in the back booth, when your eggs are
greasy
and your hash browns underdone. Snick the buttons off the front
of my dress
and toss them one by one into the pond where carp lurk just
beneath the surface,
their cold fins waving. Love me on the hood of a truck no one’s
driven
in years, sunk to its fenders in weeds and dead sunflowers;
and in the lilies, your mouth on my white throat, while turtles
drag
their bellies through slick mud, through the footprints of coots and
ducks.
Do it when no one’s looking, when the riots begin and the planes
open up,
when the bus leaps the curb and the driver hits the brakes and the
pedal sinks to the floor,
while someone hurls a plate against the wall and picks up another,
love me like a freezing shot of vodka, like pure agave, love me
when you’re lonely, when we’re both too tired to speak, when you
don’t believe
in anything, listen, there isn’t anything, it doesn’t matter; lie down
with me and close your eyes, the road curves here, I’m cranking up
the radio
and we’re going, we won’t turn back as long as you love me,
as long as you keep on doing it exactly like that.”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“I'm so in love with you I can't stand up.”
― Kim Addonizio

“They hang around, hitting on your friends
or else you never hear from them again.
They call when they’re drunk, or finally get sober,

they’re passing through town and want dinner,
they take your hand across the table, kiss you
when you come back from the bathroom.

They were your loves, your victims,
your good dogs or bad boys, and they’re over
you now. One writes a book in which a woman

who sounds suspiciously like you
is the first to be sadistically dismembered
by a serial killer. They’re getting married

and want you to be the first to know,
or they’ve been fired and need a loan,
their new girlfriend hates you,

they say they don’t miss you but show up
in your dreams, calling to you from the shoe boxes
where they’re buried in rows in your basement.

Some nights you find one floating into bed with you,
propped on an elbow, giving you a look
of fascination, a look that says I can’t believe

I’ve found you. It’s the same way
your current boyfriend gazed at you last night,
before he pulled the plug on the tiny white lights

above the bed, and moved against you in the dark
broken occasionally by the faint restless arcs
of headlights from the freeway’s passing trucks,

the big rigs that travel and travel,
hauling their loads between cities, warehouses,
following the familiar routes of their loneliness.”
― Kim Addonizio "Ex-Boyfriends"

“Imagine a sentence as a hall with a series of doors. Each door is a possible way to use what you’ve already written to generate new material.”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

“You were a town with one pay phone and someone else was using it.
You were an ATM temporarily unable to dispense cash.
You were an outdated link and the server was down.
You were invisible to the naked eye.
You were the two insect parts per million allowed in peanut butter.
You were a car wash that me as dirty as when I pulled in.
You were twenty rotting bags of rice in the hold of a cargo plane sitting on the runway in a drought-riddled country.
You were one job opening for two hundred applicants and you paid minimum wage.
You were grateful for my submission but you just couldn't use it.
You weren't a Preferred Provider.
You weren't giving any refunds.
You weren't available for comment.
Your grave wasn't marked so I wandered the cementary for hours, part of the grass, part of the crumbling stones.”
― Kim Addonizio, Lucifer at the Starlite: Poems

“You Don't Know What Love Is

But you know how to raise it in me
like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to
wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.
How to start clean. This love even sits up
and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.
Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want
to get into the fast car, one low to the ground, and drive
to some cinderblock shithole in the desert
where she can drink and get sick and then
dance in nothing but her underwear. You know
where she's headed, you know she'll wake up
with an ache she can't locate and no money
and a terrible thirst. So to hell
with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt
and your tongue down my throat
like an oxygen tube. Cover me
in black plastic. Let the mourners through.”
― Kim Addonizio

“Robert Frost said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”
― Kim Addonizio, The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

“This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called “the unsayable said.” If”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

“FUCK There are people who will tell you that using the word fuck in a poem indicates a serious lapse of taste, or imagination, or both. It’s vulgar, indecorous, an obscenity that crashes down like an anvil falling through a skylight to land on a restaurant table, on the white linen, the cut-glass vase of lilacs. But if you were sitting over coffee when the metal hit your saucer like a missile, wouldn’t that be the first thing you’d say? Wouldn’t you leap back shouting, or at least thinking it, over and over, bell-note riotously clanging in the church of your brain while the solicitous waiter led you away, wouldn’t you prop your shaking elbows on the bar and order your first drink in months, telling yourself you were lucky to be alive? And if you wouldn’t say anything but Mercy or Oh my or Land sakes, well then I don’t want to know you anyway and I don’t give a fuck what you think of my poem. The world is divided into those whose opinions matter and those who will never have a clue, and if you knew which one you were I could talk to you, and tell you that sometimes there’s only one word that means what you need it to mean, the way there’s only one person when you first fall in love, or one infant’s cry that calls forth the burning milk, one name that you pray to when prayer is what’s left to you. I’m saying in the beginning was the word and it was good, it meant one human entering another and it’s still what I love, the word made flesh. Fuck me, I say to the one whose lovely body I want close, and as we fuck I know it’s holy, a psalm, a hymn, a hammer ringing down on an anvil, forging a whole new world.”
― Kim Addonizio, What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems

“I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath.”
― Kim Addonizio

“The truth is that writing is simply not reliable. You can't count on it to be there just because you've made some space for it. In fact, making space might make it disappear. You tell yourself you can't write in the middle of your daily life, with all its distractions and commitments, and when you finally clear the decks, light off for someplace scenic or at least private, you sit there completely paralyzed. You have devoted yourself to writing, but it has not returned your devotion. If writing were a person, you would be in an abusive relationship. The healthy thing to do would be to get a restraining order and shut it right out of your heart.”
― Kim Addonizio, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life

“Stolen Moments

What happened, happened once. So now it’s best
in memory—an orange he sliced: the skin
unbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedge
lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin
membrane between us, the exquisite orange,
tongue, orange, my nakedness and his,
the way he pushed me up against the fridge—
Now I get to feel his hands again, the kiss
that didn’t last, but sent some neural twin
flashing wildly through the cortex. Love’s
merciless, the way it travels in
and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove
we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers
on the table. And we still had hours.

Kim Addonizio, What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems. (W. W. Norton & Company; unknown edition, August 17, 2005)”
― Kim Addonizio, What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems

“And finally
the glass that contains and spills this stuff continually
while the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathers
up empties, gives back the drinker's own face. Who knows what it looks like;
who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely,
who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger toward
the bathroom, some man or woman or even lost
angel who recklessly threw it all over—heaven, the ether,
the celestial works—and said, Fuck it, I want to be human?”
― Kim Addonizio

“Poems are what you make when you experience life in a certain way. Alive to yourself in the world, observant of inner and outer reality, and connected to language”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

“Poetry is an intimate act. It’s about bringing forth something that’s inside you—whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It’s about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others—not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art.”
― Kim Addonizio, The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

“Intimacy

The woman in the cafe making my cappuccino — dark eyes, dyed
red hair,
sleeveless black turtleneck — used to be lovers with the man I’m
seeing now.
She doesn’t know me; we’re strangers, but still I can’t glance at her
casually, as I used to, before I knew. She stands at the machine,
sinking the nozzle
into a froth of milk, staring at nothing — I don’t know what she’s
thinking.
For all I know she might be remembering my lover, remembering
whatever happened
between them — he’s never told me, except to say that it wasn’t
important, and then
he changed the subject quickly, too quickly now that I think about
it; might he,
after all, have been lying, didn’t an expression of pain cross his
face for just
and instant? I can’t be sure. And really it was nothing, I tell myself;
there’s no reason for me to feel awkward standing here, or
complicitous,
as though there’s something significant between us.
She could be thinking of anything; why, now, do I have the sudden
suspicion
that she knows, that she feels me studying her, trying to imagine
them together?—
her lipstick’s dark red, darker than her hair — trying to see him
kissing her, turning her over in bed
the way he likes to have me. I wonder if maybe
there were things about her he preferred, things he misses now
that we’re together;
sometimes, when he and I are making love, there are moments
I’m overwhelmed by sadness, and though I’m there with him I
can’t help thinking
of my ex-husband’s hands, which I especially loved, and I want to
go back
to that old intimacy, which often felt like the purest happiness
I’d ever known, or would. But all that’s over; and besides, weren’t
there other lovers
who left no trace? When I see them now, I can barely remember
what they looked like undressed, or how it felt to have them
inside me. So what is it I feel as she pours the black espresso into
the milk,
and pushes the cup toward me, and I give her the money,
and our eyes meet for just a second, and our fingers touch?”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“You were the two insect parts per million allowed in peanut butter.”
― Kim Addonizio, Lucifer at the Starlite: Poems

“To hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throat like an oxygen tube. Cover me in black plastic.
Let the mourners through.”
― Kim Addonizio, What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems

“We lose June. We lose July. In August we look in mirrors and want to die.”
― Kim Addonizio, Wild Nights

“Today I want
to resolve nothing.
I only want to walk
a little longer in the cold
blessing of the rain,
and lift my face to it..”
― Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

“YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT LOVE IS but you know how to raise it in me like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to wash off the sludge, the stench of our past. How to start clean. This love even sits up and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps. Any day now she’ll try to eat solid food. She’ll want to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive to some cinderblock shithole in the desert where she can drink and get sick and then dance in nothing but her underwear. You know where she’s headed, you know she’ll wake up with an ache she can’t locate and no money and a terrible thirst. So to hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throat like an oxygen tube. Cover me in black plastic. Let the mourners through.”
― Kim Addonizio, What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems