1
There is a love for structure in them that I recognize, and a desire to worship correctness that I know and I share. When I look at them, I think: to prize traditionalism above all else in a church that began in revolution is to do a great violence to it. But I feel that same ache for the past in myself: to uphold the columns of literature, grammar, the Western tradition. The English language began as an upheaval; I am not protecting it when I try to guard it against change. The Jesus Christ of it, Chaucer, walked across the water telling dirty jokes, made twenty stories stretch to feed a million people, spelled the word "cunt" five ways, performed miracles. Any innovation I put down on paper is an attempt to remind myself of this. I am not modern. I was not born to blaze new paths or bring down walls. I break form against my nature to tell myself that revolution, too, is a tradition that must be upheld.Patricia Lockwood
2
All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.Patricia Lockwood
3
My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive system, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.Patricia Lockwood
4
I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn't work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome. Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in that place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am. .Patricia Lockwood
5
In a field where else you found a stackof revealing nature photographs, of supernude naturephotographs, split beaver of course nature photographs, photographs full of 70s bush, nature taking comefrom every man from miles around, nature with come backto me just dripping from her lips. The stack cameup to your eye, you saw: nature is big into bloodplay, nature is into extreme age play, nature does wild inter-racial, nature she wants you to pee in her mouth, natureis dead and nature is sleeping and still nature is on all fours, a horse it fucks nature to death up in Oregon, nature is hotyoung amateur redheads, the foxes are all in their holesfor the night, nature is hot old used-up cougars, naturemakes gaping fake-agony faces, nature is consensual dad-on-daughter, nature is completely obsessed with twins, nature doing specialty and nature doing niche, exotic femalesthey line up to drip for you, nature getting paddled as hardas you can paddle her, oh a whitewater rapid with her assin the air, high snowy tail on display just everywhere.Patricia Lockwood
6
See men for miles around give nature what she needs, rivers and rivers and rivers of it. You exhale with perfecthappiness. Nature turned you down in high school. Now you can come in her eye.Patricia Lockwood
7
I'm not interested in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I'm not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don't want the earth, if that's where all the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here. I want us to bring down the enemy of our suffering once and for all, and I want us to loot the pockets, and I want us to take baths in the blood.Patricia Lockwood
8
I fuckin eat silence of crickets for fun. I got life afterlife and a name like Baby. Every time I try to cry a teara new kittenhead grows out of me.Patricia Lockwood
9
We worshipped a great white body that was an avalanche of good news, and we slit it open in every part. “That can’t go through the mail, ” the postman gasped, “because that is a super-stabbed body! ” The super-stabbed body rose up, with many butterknives sticking out of it, and said, “I AM the mail.” It had so many lovers.Patricia Lockwood
10
He clenched his small fist, bellowed his rage to the heavens, and resolved to never again recognize the authority of any man on earth.Patricia Lockwood
11
As they perform this ritual, I almost have to turn away, thinking again what a boomeranging, out-of-body experience it is to watch a religious childhood from the outside, when before I was in the very marrow of it.Patricia Lockwood
12
I simply ate a fish-head, but fish-heads won't fillme now. Your attention is a fish-head, so throw it back into my new body, backinto the body climbing the stairs.Patricia Lockwood
13
The half of her that is underwater would like to beunder a desk, the head of her that is underwaterwould like to be fully immersed.Patricia Lockwood