Sabrina Orah Mark > Quotes

“The prose poem for me becomes a kind of chamber with no way out… a kind of hunt, because what is hunt but a breathing thing caught inside the house or the body or the box without the possibility of an exit?”
― Sabrina Orah Mark

“where I fold and unfold my left arm into November, my hair
into my sister,
where the black-gloved woman plays my heart like a crumpled
violin,
where I stand creased and lusting for paper, where I have no
more dead lovers
than you, where beautiful girls are always asked for directions,
where I keep myself real, flirting with the ventriloquists,
where my father holds me like a paper doll, where doors can be
torn down
swiftly, where neither one of us is a miracle,

I understand only this:

It is lonely in a place that can burn so fast.


from "The Origami Fields”
― Sabrina Orah Mark, The Babies

“The strange thing about being a mother is how often I’m interrupted. Like something is happening and then something else is happening. It is difficult to get a good grasp on things.”
― Sabrina Orah Mark, Wild Milk

“I come from a long line of superstitious people. We spit three times, we keep salt in our pockets, we wear tiny hands against our chests, we throw no baby showers, we chew on thread, we break the glass, we knock on wood, we rarely smile for fear of bringing attention to a happiness we rarely feel, for fear of someone out of nowhere taking our happiness away.”
― Sabrina Orah Mark, Wild Milk

“where I fold and unfold my left arm into November, my hair
          into my sister,
where the black-gloved woman plays my heart like a crumpled
          violin,
where I stand creased and lusting for paper, where I have no
          more dead lovers
than you, where beautiful girls are always asked for directions,
where I keep myself real, flirting with the ventriloquists,
where my father holds me like a paper doll, where doors can be
          torn down
swiftly, where neither one of us is a miracle,

I understand only this:

It is lonely in a place that can burn so fast.

— Sabrina Orah Mark, “In The Origami Fields,” The Babies. (Saturnalia; 1st Edition edition, November 15, 2004)

 

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― Sabrina Orah Mark, The Babies

“I’m sorry, Son / I’m just a poet. I hope this is enough. / If it isn’t I’ll burn down the house / and give you the ashes.”
― Sabrina Orah Mark, Wild Milk

“We ask the child to drag around the unwieldy weight of magic. To clap wildly. To believe in what we believe in no longer. We ask the child to keep the awe we forgot how to hold. The fairy isn't the fairy. It's the child who is the fairy.”
― Sabrina Orah Mark, Happily: A Personal History-with Fairy Tales

“This is the problem with hunger. This is the problem with love. There is no end in sight.”
― Sabrina Orah Mark, Wild Milk

“There are so many people, and they are so beautiful and hopeful. And they too are covered in holes. They each carry a bucket. And in each bucket is a hole. This is the song we're in.”
― Sabrina Orah Mark, Wild Milk

“After seven to ten days, the nit hatches and becomes what is known as a nymph, or a young louse. Cycles are essential to life. Without patterns our bodies would wander off into the middle of a parched field and just stand there staring up at the sky.”
― Sabrina Orah Mark, Wild Milk