Date: 2000

"I go back / to the world where your brain flooded suddenly though your heart / and lungs lived three more days."

— Sagaser, Elizabeth Harris

Date: 2000

"After // my girls are in bed or while / they play in the sandbox and / my husband gardens, I rush / down the winding stairs of / relative mental health where / we live, where I talk, deny, / or compose poems."

— Sagaser, Elizabeth Harris

Date: 2000

"And the end of your pleasure: / elegant neurons switching in a blink, / lighting your brain like a great city."

— Sagaser, Elizabeth Harris

Date: 2000

"It's the death of your memory I still / cannot fathom: never in such small space / such wealth."

— Sagaser, Elizabeth Harris

Date: 2002

"Of the friend watching him leave remembering / the story of her body / with his once and the stories of their children / made with other people and how his mind went on / pressing hers like a body."

— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)

Date: 2002

"There is the story of the mind's temperature neither cold nor celibate."

— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)

Date: 2003

"How to hold it all at once, / except by passion's climb, / its rising tides & breathless, / hawk's-eye view?"

— Spaar, Lisa Russ

Date: 2003

"Believe the fallen leaf / from one world floats there, / in another, tawny star on the black water, / the soul's cradle, / even when he must pause / to rest his racing heart, / & cannot see it?"

— Spaar, Lisa Russ

Date: 2004

"O woman, with a mind Picasso / could have painted, giving you many cheeks, / each one turned a different way."

— Sholl, Betsy

Date: 2004

"Those final sounds, however, are nothing like the wind moving through the vacancy of a mind."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)