Date: 1980

"The back of the mind is a small hotel / And when the residents go on picnics / Or take buckets and spades down to the sea / The betrayals begin."

— Longley, Michael (b. 1939)

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: 2003

"The mind is a hotel with a thousand rooms."

— Dinh, Linh (b. 1963)

Date: January 25, 2005

"I'm staring out into that vacuum again / From the back porch of my mind / The only thing that's alive, I'm all there is."

— Oberst, Conor Mullen (b. 1980)

Date: December 2009

"To keep your cell the way you keep your soul, / Untidy-minded, neither soiled nor sold / For next to nothing, a treasury of old / Notions like the notes of a piano-roll / Which cannot improvise though it knows a whole / Repertoire, what ought one to withhold?"

— Hine, Daryl (b. 1936)

Date: December 2009

"This stanza become a catacomb or tomb / That serves as a temporary safe deposit / Vault for your perduring lost & found / Mind, which articulately could presume / To ask of being what could cause it, / A question as unanswerable as profound."

— Hine, Daryl (b. 1936)

Date: 2012

"Once, borracho, at breakfast, / he said: The heart can only be broken / / once, like a window."

— Corral, Eduardo C.

Date: 2014

"You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"Words work as release--well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"The days of our childhood together were steep steps into a collapsing mind."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)