Date: 1999

"The next day, I changed all my classmates’ names to numbers to better reflect their metal hearts."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)

Date: 1999

"But my mother told me that just the opposite was true. That the pictures in your mind were always more beautiful than what was in the world."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)

Date: 1999

"'How do you expect to learn anything when you fill your mind with garbage?' he said."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)

Date: 1999

"A soul was like a worm in an apple, my mother told me."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)

Date: 1999

"Just as birds are lifted up into the air by their feathers and can remain wherever they wish, the soul in the body is elevated by thought and spreads its wings everywhere."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)

Date: June 19, 2000

"The record she'd given me was playing in my mind, and I kept trying to shut it off."

— Packer, ZZ (b. 1973)

Date: June 19, 2000

"The words slid from my brain, and knotted in my stomach."

— Packer, ZZ (b. 1973)

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