Her poems massage the hurt from my heart—not by asking me to avoid it, but by asking me to sit with it and to speak with it—to know it. And I know how to do that. I have a pen on my nightstand. I grab it. I don’t even get up to find my notebook. I write in the back of Dr. Adkins’s book, the way she once told me she used to do in her favorite poetry books. It pours from me, unbroken. Seeing my words spilling onto the page dulls the keen edge of my misery. Beauty in every wound. Dignity in heartbreak. This is what your mama was looking for—just to stop hurting for a while—and it killed her. As
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