Date: 1999

"The cactus where your heart should be / Has lovely little flowers / So though it's always pricking me / My ardor never sours."

— Stephin Merritt (b. February 9, 1965)

Date: 1999

"Love is wrapped around my heart / Like a boa constrictor, babe."

— Stephin Merritt (b. February 9, 1965)

Date: 1999

"Caution, to prevent electric shock / Do not remove cover / No user-serviceable parts inside / Refer servicing to qualified / Service personnel" // Let this be the epitaph for my heart

— Stephin Merritt (b. February 9, 1965)

Date: 1999

"Who will mourn the passing of my heart? / Will its little droppings climb the pop chart?"

— Stephin Merritt (b. February 9, 1965)

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

"Emotions, atavisms, would be set aside, while reason -- the nabob of all faculties -- went about its work."

— Amis, Martin (b. 1949)

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