I missed Gray. I missed his shoe collection in the closet. I missed watching him brush his hair, as if I was seeing something I shouldn’t. He said he felt effeminate styling his hair in front of me, pulling it back into a slick ponytail. I missed his body in the bed, the way he slept with one arm tossed across my back.

But when I lay in bed at night I saw the deep abscesses on the chests of sheep, dragging themselves to food and water across a rock-strewn lawn. The scared eyes of the feral cats underneath the sofa. I felt the warm bodies of the retrievers next to me, the kind of limitless love other people dreamed of and I had — all to myself.

— Megan Mayhew Bergman, “Every Vein a Tooth,” Birds of a Lesser Paradise (177)

I liked the starlets in old movies — their neatly nipped waists, thick lipstick, and cherry-pie sopranos. I liked the way they looked when they drank, their red nails on the crystal highball. In old movies, America was beautiful, women could still feign naivete, men worked one job their entire lives, and everyone could carry a tune. Who didn’t want to live in an old movie.

— Megan Mayhew Bergman, “Another Story She Won’t Believe,” Birds of a Lesser Paradise (105)

I’ve been told self-righteous people always have it coming, that when you profess to understand the universe, the universe conspires against you. It gathers and strengthens and thunders down upon you like a biblical storm. It buries your face in humble pie and licks the cream from your nose because when the universe hates you, it really hates you.

— Megan Mayhew Bergman, “Yesterday’s Whales,” Birds of a Lesser Paradise (77)

Will you love me forever? I think to myself. Will you love be when I’m old? If I go crazy? Will you be embarrassed of me? Avoid my calls? Wash dishes when you talk to me on the phone, roll your eyes, lay the receiver down next to the cat?

I realize how badly I need a piece of my mother. A scrap, a sound, a smell — something. 

I hunger for the person who birthed me, whose body, I realized after becoming a mother myself, was overrun with nerve endings that ran straight to her heart, until it was numb with overuse, or until, perhaps, she felt nothing.

— Megan Mayhew Bergman, “Housewifely Arts,” Birds of a Lesser Paradise (19)

Downtown was eight blocks long: little yellow, blue, and green houses with cement-slab porches, crammed among leafless cottonwoods, dirt lawns, and cracked sidewalks. There were two gas stations, one boarded up. One tall grain elevator rusted at its metal seams, a small glassless window at the top, the gaping black mouth eating rain and snow and sleet, eating all the cries an accusations the wind carries with it, of failed enterprise and family farms. A one-story brick liquor store advertising fishing and hunting licenses; a lopsided pickup in forestservice green and rotted wood-handled ranch tools scattered around it. A mom-and-pop hardware. A country kitchen. A white-painted church.

- Bonnie Nadzam, Lamb (148)

Through (w)riting, ancestors do come to visit and become our informants for a literature of transformation. Toni Morrison didn’t write Beloved, her slave ancestors did. The most trangressive storytelling, like the traditional myths of our pueblos, are passed down to us through rites of remembering. How do we conjure those stories?

- Cherríe Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000 - 2010 (94)

At times, I feel I have been educated into spiritual dumbness. I write in the effort to lose my mind into that site where a grand openness can teach me something I hadn’t thought of.

- Cherríe Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000 - 2010 (94)

The ceremony always begins for me in the same way…always with the hungry woman. Always the place of disquiet (inquietud) moving the writing to become a kind of excavation, an earth-dig of the spirit found through the body. The impulse to write may begin in the dream, the déjà vu, a few words, which once uttered through my own mouth or the mouth another, refuse to leave the body of the heart. Writing is an act prompted by intuition, a whispered voice, a tightening of the gut. It is an irrevocable promise to not forget what the body holds as memory.

-Cherríe L. Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000 - 2010 (34)

My favorite sort of Facebook status update is the sort that is obtuse and unknowable…a good Facebook status reminds your network, and yourself, that you are sitting alone somewhere, full of yearning, that you have a desire that needs meeting or a wave of nostalgia that needs revealing or an unspoken sorrow that needs an indirect catharsis…I do not want to know exactly what my Facebook friends are doing; I want to know what they are struggling to express, I want the unsayable said, the unknowable known.

-Dean Bakopoulos, My American Unhappiness (188)

In Paris, our love was respected. These were the Clinton years, and two young, leftist Americans in love, ambling along the Seine, were a sight to behold. We took in the knowing nods and warm smiles of the French, we acknowledged the silent accord we had with them—they would continue to provide us a place of rest and higher culture, and we would continue to come there and spend our money; we would beam all of the American earnestness and heartfelt wonder that we could muster and they could feel superior to our lack of urbanity and sophistication.

-Dean Bakopoulos, My American Unhappiness (94)