We are in the grip of some big machine grinding us along. The force of it simplifies everything. A weird calm settled over me from inside out. What is about to happen has stood in line to happen. All the roads out of that instant have been closed, one by one.

The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.

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.

The truth is when I went to graduate school I would've said I was among the least talented of the students, I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard.

I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.

When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they're absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind.

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.