Fiona Benson > Quotes

“Let my teeth become water let my skin become water let my flesh become water let my bones become water — Cyane, or a woman who’s heard more than she can stand and takes herself to the well and drops herself in like a stone; heavy bullet, exit wound; Cyane: soiled water; body in the well.”
― Fiona Benson, Vertigo & Ghost: Poems

“Our crazy girls, our glorious, stampeding calves.”
― Fiona Benson, Vertigo & Ghost

“Jesus fucking Christ, I don’t know who / I’m teaching you to hide from, but look / how eagerly you learn.”
― Fiona Benson, Vertigo & Ghost

“I think they pilot me / into agonies of protection — / it’s not my own mortality / I flail at now, but theirs”
― Fiona Benson, Vertigo & Ghost

“The way my grandmother tells it, she didn’t know / there was anything out of the ordinary wrong, / and June died in the night in wet sheets, alone, / as the terrible roses bloomed beneath her skin.”
― Fiona Benson, Vertigo & Ghost

“It knew it was out in the open. / It did not know it was dead”
― Fiona Benson, Vertigo & Ghost