If you knew you were going to lose your memory but you could choose five things you’d never forget, what would they be—a certain face, a taste, a scent, a touch; how deepen this, the middle of your life?

— Kristen Henderson

In history, the bleeding from arbitrary beatings, forced breeding, and choked-heat breathing could almost be withstood by soul-feeding songs sung, or listlessly hummed just to go on.

— Kristen Henderson

I tell you once and for all—in front of the angel pictures on the wall, that I am not a host to load-bearing ghosts or heady entities, and if I was ever holy, I have fallen far into the dense atmosphere of the living.

— Kristen Henderson

It was as if someone had left the bird whereas a kind of telegram of feathers, oily feathers that looked like they’d struggled, shuttered a little before letting go into flight forever.

— Kristen Henderson

I wonder what became of you, your Johnny Rotten skin, no Emerald City eyes. You'd have been a beauty if you let inferiority steam your glasses with its candor, sans laughter.

— Kristen Henderson

I write for pages, get lost in the mezzanine hidden from stages.

— Kristen Henderson

Once, I took the penny whistle you gave me and discovered a spotty the roaring falls where I could play as loud as I wanted. I lay in the bifurcated trunk of a low-slung birch tree. The sun peeked through applauding leaves, high overhead.

— Kristen Henderson

Once lively peonies now wind-weary, and ragged at the edges, hang their heavy crowns; rain on their backs, one final act, before detaching from the stem and falling down.

— Kristen Henderson

She was so cool, as she knew, ankles crossed at the puckered hem of granite gray sweatpants, and she also knew I was watching from the open door of the B train—watching her pose in apparent comfort at the girder of this city thoroughfare.

— Kristen Henderson

Such is a community of inviolable immunity, protected from tampering or harpooning mutiny. Every better thinker’s impulse to shrink us (at the shoreline from our lifeblood’s deep pulse) uses disparaging scrutiny to sink us.

— Kristen Henderson