Chelsea G. Summers

Preverbal, love is the smell of a known body, the touch of a recognized hand, the blurred face in a haze of light. Words come, and love sharpens.

Love becomes describable, narratable, relatable. Over time, one love comes to lay atop another, a mother’s love, a father’s love, a lover’s love, a friend’s love, an enemy’s love. This promiscuous mixing of feelings and touches, of smiles and cries in the dark, of half-hushed pleasures and heart-cracking pain, of shared unutterable intimacies and guttural expressions, layer in embellished bricolage.

In the end, I chose to do nothing with what I knew

there was no immediate reason to rush anything.

Divided by what they chose to eat, these people are united by the fact that they committed crimes that caused the State to kill them. What drives killers to kill is a very personal question. We like to think that men kill because they’re men—it’s as indiscriminate as their wont to procreate. The quarterbacks in the high school of life, men are given a wide berth for murder, as they are for most things. Women, on the other hand, kill for only two reasons, or so the people w

Prison may be the hell of other people, but at least it’s not a hell of people you love.

Emotional attachment is for children, and sentimentality is for great meals you’ll never eat again.

Once the affection is gone, I always have a hard time recollecting it; it comes to me in phantasmagoric slivers in the quicksilver small hours of the night. Once the affection is gone, it slips from my memory like the face of a dead relative

“It feels like the last decade was a dream.” He nosed closer to my heart.

He needed to die.

It’s better to live with guilt and remorse than it is to die—just look at how many of us cheat on our partners, our taxes, our diets, our dissertations. And that’s not even with our backs pressed cold against a dead glacier wall. It’s surprisingly easy to overcome moral qualms, if you give in to the appetite