“An airport after security and before boarding is, at least to me, the last place where every verb is only in the future tense.” “The veil feels thin between who I have settled into being and all the other people I could have been.” “Maybe it is possible to want the things you have”

“That was always my dream of this city, watching it from a fire escape, in it and not in it.” “To be loved, one must be self-sufficient, whole in oneself, needless. Neediness is something anyone can smell coming off of you like the stink of unwashed clothes; love is guaranteed only by not needing love, maybe by not even wanting it, by turning and walking fast in the other direction.” “New York, for all its well-worn jokes and pretensions, is much America as anywhere. The skyscrapers of the wealthy stand in for wide open fields. Here, if you can afford it, you can live in a rooted glass spaceship so far enough off the ground that you never have to notice that you owe anyone anything. You can float in an uncaring cloud city, with everything you need delivered to the door, a transactional life broken up into clean and independent pieces.” “The next day there was the same list of things that had to be done, small graces and details, mistakes and apologies, threads to tie to one another.“

“The poems offer a version of the world in which we might reach toward others’ joy in the same gesture as reaching toward our own, rather than dissecting faults and hoarding happiness.” “I am aware that this is a way of being bad at social media, just like insisting on joy is a way of being bad at poetry. I am aware that documenting my love is basic in the same way that O’Hara being my favorite poet is basic. But, at least for me, this obsessive documentation of the stupid, boring, repetitive things that string a life together is the place where social media aspires to the level of poetry.” “Love celebrates another person’s existence rather than their achievements.” “Look at this pattern of days, this holiday that means nothing outside itself.”