Brett Fletcher Lauer > Quotes

“I don’t remember when I first allowed a boy to treat me like a dagger, or the first time I discovered that crying in the rain underneath a boy you don’t love or won’t remember isn’t the fastest route to god, to heaven, or the torments of truth.”
― Brett Fletcher Lauer, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation

“Everyone was happier. But where did the sadness go? People wanted to know. They didn’t want it collecting in their elbows or knees then popping up later.”
― Brett Fletcher Lauer, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation

“how long two people could stare at each other instead of rain,”
― Brett Fletcher Lauer, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation

“when i was younger i hoped to grow up and spend a day on far rockaway beach talking about how much i like morning sex.”
― Brett Fletcher Lauer, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation

“Eventually, the ponies were no longer needed. People had learned to imagine their sadness trotting away.”
― Brett Fletcher Lauer, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation

“My mother turned to me and said, “Will you forgive me?” We hadn’t been talking before the storm. I was barely fifteen; I didn’t even know how to blame her yet.”
― Brett Fletcher Lauer, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation

“Because the first penis I ever saw belonged to a boy who used knives as language, because that boy was my brother, because the boy was my brother whose words were serrated, because he lived beneath”
― Brett Fletcher Lauer, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation

“This is what I am trying to say: I was in no condition to have paid closer attention to plot development. There were no flashbulb memories pausing time, creating a mental photograph of how sunlight fell in a pattern on the parquet floor, individual facial expressions, what I was wearing, or the particular geometry of where bodies were located in the apartment's floor plan. I've requested all the mental and visual impressions in the library of my brain, like an interlibrary-loan—The Book of Devastating Phone Calls & Their Aftermath (153.1BFL)—only to learn the book has been pulled from the shelf and remaindered. I have only the fragments of conversations, the scrapbooks, the digital debris, and the patchwork of letters saved. I revisit and reread them. I look at them over and over, hoping if I stare at them long enough it becomes something like being there again, like remembering, and thus, once relived innumerable times, becomes solidly the stuff of the past. The phone was ringing. The phone rang. I answered it.”
― Brett Fletcher Lauer, Fake Missed Connections

“I shook loose, but that isn’t the whole story. The fact is I’m still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks at the edge of a field.”
― Brett Fletcher Lauer, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation