Clementine Von Radics Quotes

“All this time
I drank you like the cure when maybe
you were the poison.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“I stopped going to therapy
because I knew my therapist was right
and I wanted to keep being wrong.
I wanted to keep my bad habits
like charms on a bracelet.
I did not want to be brave.
I think I like my brain best
in a bar fight with my heart.
I think I like myself a little broken.
I'm ok if that makes me less loved.
I like poetry better than therapy anyway.
The poems never judge me
for healing wrong.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“If anyone else were to kiss me, all they would taste is your name.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“I know
you and I
are not about poems or
other sentimental bullshit
but I have to tell you
even the way
you drink your coffee
knocks me the fuck out.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“I'm scared you will realize I'm just bones and questions and leave me for something solid.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“I wonder if you know yet that you'll leave me. That you are a child playing with matches and I have a paper body. You will meet a girl with a softer voice and stronger arms and she will not have violent secrets or an affection for red wine or eyes that never stay dry. You will fall into her bed and I'll go back to spending Friday nights with boys who never learn my last name.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“You never need to apologize
for how you chose to survive.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“I mean you ask me
not to fall in love with you
and then you go write poems
with your tongue
and draw constellations
in my freckles.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“My battered heart will always be
where the ocean meets the sand, I
will break over and over
Every day. That is the best and
worst part of me.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“All of us need to stop apologizing for having been to hell and come back breathing”

— Clementine Von Radics

“Everyone else isn't you. It turns out that's a huge problem for me.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“But my heart is an old house
(the kind my mother
grew up in)
hell to heat and cool
and faulty in the wiring
and though it's nice to look at
I have no business
inviting lovers in.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“I want a tattoo of the first morning we woke up together. I want the memory to hurt.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“I thought leaving you would be easy,
just walking out the door
but I keep getting pinned against it
with my legs around your waist and it's like
my lips want you like my lungs want air,
it's just what they where born to do so
I am sitting at work thinking of you
cutting vegetables in my kitchen
your hair in my shower drain
your fingers on my spine in the morning
while we listen to Muddy Waters, I know
you will never be the one I call home
but the way you talk about poems
like marxists talk of revolution
it makes me want to keep trying.
I'm still looking for reasons to love you.
I'm still looking for proof you love me.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“The difference
between being loved and being fucked
is I can't remember how the first feels.
I come to bed quiet, kiss with my eyes closed,
hate how easily I touch you.
Find me the sweetest boy, with a heart
more hopeful than spun sugar on a hot day,
I will teach him the meaning of meaningless
nights. The whole time, every moment, wishing
he'd crack me open, rib by rib, to see
how I work. How I bleed.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“It's just so strange.
You used to love me,
and now you're a stranger
who happens to know all
of my secrets.”

— Clementine Von Radics

God I want you
in some primal, wild way
animals want each other.
Untamed and full of teeth.
God I want you,
In some chaste, Victorian way.
A glimpse of your ankle
just kills me.

— Clementine Von Radics

“It's 11 am and I'm sitting in a restaurant
3 beers in. Believe me, even I'm surprised
I'm still alive sometimes.
I have been drinking about you for 2 days.
Lately you remind me of a wild thing
chewing through its foot. But you
are already free and I don't know what to do
except trace the rough line of your jaw
and try not to place blame.
Here is the truth: It is hard to be in love
with someone who is in love someone else.
I don't know how to turn that into poetry.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“We are not in love. Not the way I've been told
being in love feels like. But we have been sleeping
beside each other for so many nights and I
am the most beautiful doormat you have ever
walked over.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“Apologies do not make good bandages.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“Everything about my heart is a crime scene.
I drink to forget things it takes me 2 beers to name.
I pour my breath into things only worth forgetting.
I have nothing left to say to the ghosts.
Their cold hands and bitter mouths keep kissing me awake
when I have asked them nicely and then not-so-nicely
to be left alone.
I have nothing left to say to the ghosts.
Two decades full of nothing but monsters and crime scenes
and sometimes I am the monster and sometimes
I am the crime scene. There is nothing I would undo
so much as things I wish would wake up forgotten.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“No, I'm not ok. But I haven't been ok since I was 11, maybe 12. I am still here though.
I'm still breathing. For me, sometimes, that will have to be enough.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“I said, I love you
when I meant something much
more specific, I should have said,
Please don't leave me,
I'm afraid to sleep alone.”

— Clementine Von Radics

Let it heal you. Lie beside a man who's hands you trust

— Clementine Von Radics

“There Is A Lion In My Living Room
I feed it raw meat
so it does not hurt me.
It is a strange thing
to nourish what could kill you
in the hopes it does not kill you.”

— Clementine Von Radics

Little girls with big ideas are much scarier than monsters.

— Clementine Von Radics

IV. There is a certain kind of girl who reads Lolita at fourteen and finds religion. I painted my eyes black and sucked barroom cherries to red my tongue. There was a boy who promised Judas really did love Jesus. I learned early every kiss and betrayal are up for interpretation.

— Clementine Von Radics

The day I bought my cane, I realized
I was through with the burden of feet. Instead,
I am going to become a mermaid.
I have always liked the ocean, the promise
of depth. I am tired of this dry world,
all of this dust and sickness, these barren fields.
I want to dive without drowning. I want to kiss sharks.
I want men to carve me into the bows of their ships
like a prayer, before I lure them into the depths
with my fishnet mouth. I want the beauty,
the gorgeous mutation, the fairytale of half body.
All the wisdom of a woman, without the failures of sex.
I am plunging. I am not coming up for air.
I do not want all this human,
my legs move like they resent being legs,
my body is wrecked by all this gravity.
I cannot face another morning waking up
with no hope of a fairytale. Here on land,
I am always drowning. Here on land,
I cannot move.

— Clementine Von Radics

“Getting everything you ever wanted does not make you want less”

— Clementine Von Radics

“What doesn't kill you leaves disfiguring scars
What doesn't kill you fills you with paralyzing self-hatred
What doesn't kill you makes you an unfit mother
What doesn't kill you makes it all so hard
What doesn't kill you wakes you up in the middle of the night
What doesn't kill you turns you into an alcoholic
What doesn't kill you makes you do unforgivable things to the people you love
What doesn't kill you makes you afraid for the rest of your life
What doesn't kill you might make you kill them”

— Clementine Von Radics

“He used to love me, and now he's just a stranger who happens to know all my secrets.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“You are on the floor crying,
and you have been on the floor crying
for days.
And that is you being brave.
That is you getting through it
as best you know how.
No one else can decide
What your tough looks like.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“There will always being those
who say you are too young and delicate
to make anything happen for yourself.
They don't see the part of you that smolders.
Don't let their doubting drown out the sound
of your own heartbeat.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“Be merciful until you can't be.
Until you feel your heart begin to harden into a bullet.
Then use that bullet.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“Now may be a good time to go on a long journey. The stars think you need to clear your head. The stars think you need to run.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“Here's the truth: It is hard to be in love with someone who is in love with someone else.”

— Clementine Von Radics

“When the poems don't come, don't open the vodka.”

— Clementine Von Radics

You never need to apologize for how you choze to survive.

— Clementine Von Radics

“There is a river running through this city and every time my best friend laughs I want to grab him by the shoulders and shout Grow old with me and never kiss me on the mouth!  I want to spend the next eighty years together, eating Doritos and riding bikes.”

— Clementine Von Radics

I am terrified
I will break his heart
just because I feel restless;
because it is between me
and what I hunger for

— Clementine Von Radics

When will I sop belonging
to this hungry thing inside of me?

— Clementine Von Radics

“Drowning people often believe that if they grab hold of someone else they can be saved, but that just makes you both sink faster.”

— Clementine Von Radics

I don't know why
I've got so much hope
pinned to someone who will never call me home.

— Clementine Von Radics

“I stopped going to my therapist
Because I knew my therapist
was right, and I wanted
to keep being wrong.”

— Clementine Von Radics