she was scared / i talk sacred

she was scared for
me to know

said her father
said

her favorite thing
then it went wrong

and even though I talk
sacred

i used to see her father
too

“For me, the form always comes first and the story follows. In that way, I probably have more in common with poets than I do with prose writers, because the one thing I never consider is plot. There is a French writer, Nathalie Sarraute, who wrote a little book called Tropisms that I read when I was about twenty-seven and it changed my life and writing style forever. She had this theory that you can build a story around a sequence of emotional intensities rather than a traditional beginning, middle, and end. I am a person who has been arrested and hospitalized and even spent some time living in a state of psychosis under an overpass. My life has been a series of intensities and so this idea really resonated with me. The first book where I really did this was Chronology of Water. I just put those experiences in a sequence and let them be what they were. It freed me from the feeling that I needed to clean them up or make them more coherent or palatable by fitting them into a typical satisfying story arc.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch