When You Do Try To Picture The

I'd Spent Way More Years Worrying About How To Look Like A Poet -- Buying Black Clothes, Smearing On Scarlet Lipstick, Languidly Draping Myself Over Thrift-store Furniture -- Than I Had Learning How To Assemble Words In Some Discernible Order.

It Turned Out To Be Impossible For Me To 'run Away' In The Sense Other American Teenagers Did. Any Movement At All Was Taken For Progress In My Family.

Every Now And Then We Enter The Presence Of The Numinous And Deduce For An Instant How We're Formed, In What Detail The Force That Infuses Every Petal Might Specifically Run Through Us, Wishing Only To Lure Us Into Our Full Potential.

Ten Years, She's Dead, And I Still Find Myself Some Mornings Reaching For The Phone To Call Her. She Could No More Be Gone Than Gravity Or The Moon.

Your Heart, Mary Karr, He'd Say. His Pen Touched My Sternum, And It Felt For All The World Like The Point Of A Dull Spear As He Said, Your Heart Knows What Your Head Don't. Or Won't.