Today Means Amen - Sierra DeMulder

• “the audacity of death, how it is the boldest of all things, how it comes and goes as it pleases.” Excerpt : My Lover Found Me Weeping on the Couch
• “In this room, no matter how hard I try, I cannot remember your name. In this room, every picture is hung crookedly and out of reach. In this room, the baby we never had is crying.” Excerpt: Seven Layers of Hell
• “I am writing about you again today and I wonder, why dig up our sad corpse?” / “and this was the best we could

do. Our nest of rubbish, our flowerless garden—we slept here. Made love among the bottle caps and ants and mold.” / “What is it about this family that draws us back to the uninhabitable? That compels us to make a bed where there isn’t one?” Excerpt: Uninhabitable

• “I stared into your chest last night as if it were a telescope. I saw our future in the distance, an island I will not swim to. I have

eaten my own legs. I have cut my own stitches. My love: you cannot fix what wants to be broken.” Excerpt: The living room needs a new coat of paint

• “ She grew up watching boys who looked like her husband grow up into dead things,” / “if you’re coming for me too, then don’t you dare miss. Change, it moves like a bullet and you already pulled the trigger.” Excerpt: The Origin of the Funeral Hat
• “He holds tightly to our hands when we say “good-bye” but doesn’t try to stop us from leaving.” Excerpt: Progress Report
• “Picture your anxiety, your midnight panic, your fear, your perennial doubt: each of these becomes not even a word in the book, barely a grain of sugar in the bowl. This is not a devaluing of your pain but a dethroning.” Excerpt: Happy New Year
• “This is how to love the healing. To be not the sound but the receptacle. To be not the therapist, but the stop after. To be not the paint, not the blank canvas, not even the sweat of creativity but to be the bed the artist crawls back to.” / “ She tells me she is scared, that the waves are rising and the ship is begging to become driftwood. The hounds are howling tonight and the moon is so full it could burst. She tells me she has been symptom-free for three weeks. Three weeks. It feels so small. A newborn. A whisper. A fluttering of smothered wings.

But sister, this is what it’s like to heal. ” / “You are drawing a map to forgiveness, where you live, where you already are—you just don’t know it yet. Perfect isn’t where we’re from and we wouldn’t like it there anyway. ” / “You were made to walk through this. You were born to travel that long journey into yourself. Look into the distance.” Excerpt: Gardner’s Daughter

• “It’s okay, we’d whisper when we thought no one could hear, you can go now. As if death was a secret he had been keeping for years." Excerpt: Floating
• “But what do I do with all this leftover love? My hands were built for crawling on. How do I write myself gently? How do I not worship the shipwreck that stranded me here?” Excerpt: After Googling Affirmations For Abuse Survivors
• “Raised in captivity, it will realize one day it, too, is made for blood. The love that will hack up the wet, pink carcass of an argument months after its neck was snapped and swallowed.The petty love. The selfish love.” Excerpt: Made For Blood
• “I have made this mistake before. I have looked into the face of love

and said no, not now but meant yes, please, today. I have pushed love into a mirror and blamed it for shattering Excerpt: Existential Crisis Brought Forth By Complaining About My Boyfriend Over a Basket of Cheese Curds

• “I loved only the idea of you for so long,I forgot you had skin.” Excerpt: At the end of the day, i am an animal
• “You made it this whole way: through the nights that swallowed you whole, the mornings that arrived in pieces. The scabs, the gravel, the doubt, the hurt, the hurt, the hurt is over. Today, you made it. You made it. You made it here.” Excerpt: Today Means Amen
• “Your hands are not as small as they used to be. Get up. This is not who you are anymore. Worth is not a well to be poisoned.” Excerpt: Release It