“At the Sound of the Gunshot, Leave A Message That's what my friend spokeinto his grim machine the winter he first went madas we both did in our thirties with stillno hope of revenue, gravely inkingour poems on pages held fast by gyres the color of lead. Godless, our minds did monster us, left us bobbing as in a swampuntil we sank. His eyes were burn holesin a swollen face. His breath was a venomhe drank deep of. He called his own tongue a scar, this poet who can crowbar openthe most sealed heart, make ash flower,and the cocked shotgun's double-zero mouths(whose pellets had exploded star holes into plaster and porcelainand not a few locked doors) never touched my friend's throat. PraiseHim, whose earth is green. (for Franz Wright)”

“In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there.”

“I kept the fingers of my left hand crossed all the time, while on my right-hand fingers I counted anything at all—steps to the refrigerator, seconds on the clock, words in a sentence—to keep my head occupied. The counting felt like something to hang on to, as if finding the right numbers might somehow crack the code on whatever system ran the slippery universe we were moving through.”

“After Mother got her picture, we all stood around the fire truck eating moon-shaped cookies dusted with powdered sugar that the mayor's wife had brought in some Tupperware. It was stuff like that that'd break your heart about Leechfield, what Daddy meant when he said the town was too ugly not to love.”