Richard Siken

“Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part…

— Richard Siken

Here I am in a rabbit run, here I am in a valley of pine, waiting for you to find me. I…

— Richard Siken

“We're shooting the scene where I swallow your heart and you make me spit it up again. I swallow your heart and…

— Richard Siken

He was pointing at the moon, but I was looking at his hand.

— Richard Siken

You play along, because you want to die for love, you always have.

— Richard Siken

“Here we are, at the place where I get to beg for it. Where I get to say ‘Please, for just one…

— Richard Siken

“I’m sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.”

— Richard Siken

“The stranger says there are no more couches and he will have to sleep in your bed. You try to warn him,…

— Richard Siken

“I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do. A box made out of leaves. What else was in…

— Richard Siken

Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we'll never get…

— Richard Siken

“It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio, how…

— Richard Siken

Knot the tie and go to work, unknot the tie and go to sleep. I sleep. I dream. I wake. I sing.…

— Richard Siken

“want to tell you this story without having to confess anything, without having to say that I ran out into the street…

— Richard Siken

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.

— Richard Siken

“You cannot get in the way of anyone's path to God. You can, but it does no good. Every spy knows this.…

— Richard Siken

You're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he…

— Richard Siken

If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.

— Richard Siken

Hello, darling. Sorry about that. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of…

— Richard Siken

Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine. I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I…

— Richard Siken

Wearing your clothes or standing in the shower for over an hour, pretending that this skin is your skin, these hands your…

— Richard Siken

“There is an empty space next to you in the backseat of the station wagon. Make it the shape of everything you…

— Richard Siken

“Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again. How…

— Richard Siken

The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.

— Richard Siken

“We are all just trying to be holy.”

— Richard Siken

I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.

— Richard Siken