Once I told my doctor if only I was not estranged from my mother, I’d know what to expect from menopause. “That’s ridiculous,” the doctor said. “Your mother had children. You’ve never even been pregnant. Her experience would have no bearing on yours. Feel badly about the estrangement if you like, but not because of this.”

This year the number I call the most now is the pharmacy. I have to wonder who you were when I was born because I feel you in both root and stem but I’ll never be sorry to have eaten the sky.

The whistle had filled Yara’s dreams for a long time now—ever since she first heard it in the form of an incoming bullet that lodged itself in her best friend’s ribcage. More than anything she saw or heard that day, it was the whistle that most haunted her. It was the first time she understood that the promise of imminent chaos was always somehow worse than the actual chaos itself.[…]

I split the pockets of stillness left hovering on a naked afternoon. Halves drop like discarded agreements—one half in the floundering arms of the sea, another in the blanks of this book I’ve beenmpretending to read, if at all.

In fiction, we take things from our own lives and things we hear, and we fictionalize them, and we make them up, and we appropriate them for our own, but somehow I think there’s this feeling with poets sometimes that that’s dishonest when done in a poem, and I don’t think it is.

The snake rears its head, its thick green body gleaming in the light. A stripe of yellow runs along its stomach. We are transfixed, frozen, burning feet forgotten. I want to touch the snake, feel the cool curve of its muscle wrap across my legs and pull me to the ground.

Writing a book is no more of a craft challenge than writing an article—they both involve skills that come with practice. In approaching different mediums, novel writing requires more personal reflection.