Now for the reason we’re doing all this.

That’s a screenshot from the Romanian-US Fulbright Commission’s Facebook page. I can’t begin to tell you how proud I am of what Amy has accomplished so far and I know she’s going to kick ass in Iași. I’m just happy I get to tag along and support her in this.

We’re in the final phase of preparation for the trip to Romania. We’ve been transforming the house we’ve lived in for almost the last 12 years into a short term rental, which is akin to moving, except all your important personal stuff that you can’t take with you (which is most of it) goes into storage and gets replaced with stuff that won’t break your heart if it gets broken or takes a walk out the door.

But beyond that, you have to outfit the house for strangers, which means new bedding and new towels and new dishes and and and. Would it surprise you to learn that there are companies that serve this specific need? Surprise is the wrong word. I didn’t know they existed but the second I learned about them, I thought “of course. There would have to be.” And so the mismatched plates we’ve amassed over the years are now in boxes in the basement while our future guests will eat on very colorful dishes made from wheat straw. We did leave out some ungeneric coffee mugs.

And then there’s the packing. So many boxes. So many trips to the store for packing tape. So many steps in and out of the basement, which is original to the house (built in 1889). It has exposed beams and ductwork about 5 feet 8 inches above the floor, which is two inches shorter than I am. It was’t empty when we started but man is it full now. We’ve also reached the point where the labeling is going a bit awry. I saw a social media post recently of a box with the word “Ephemera” on it and the caption said something like “what happens when a writer helps you move.” All my writer friends were like “yep, that tracks.” We mostly avoided that but sometimes?

No reason to lie about it.

We’ll be hitting the road soon, with our first stop being south Florida to stay with Amy’s folks briefly. Then it’s four flights over god knows how many hours, just the six of us (4 humans, 2 dogs) and our many many bags to this adventure in Romania.

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The posting here will mostly go back to being about poems. To read about and see our Romanian adventures, you’ll want to follow me on Patreon. And please, please, spread the word about it if you like what you see. I’ll be posting about it some on Bluesky and Instagram, but I’m not really a social media person and don’t expect to get much traction there. Which is fine. If I have to become BRIAN SPEARS, CONTENT CREATOR in order to make this work monetarily then maybe I just need to try to sell crocheted ears of corn named Maizie at the local market instead. I mean, they are cute.

Thanks as always for reading.

And like all people, I was smart in some ways and really really dumb in others. I was pretty good at piecing together logical arguments based on the facts in front of me, and I had a solid command of language. But I was also real easy to convince that I was right, that I had all the answers I needed. I was quick to dismiss anything that didn’t fit into my conception of the world, one that had been pretty carefully curated for me by the church.

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One of the ways the church made us feel like we were part of something special or different was in how we referred to our belief system. We called it “the truth.” When you met other Witnesses, you might be asked how long you’d been in “the truth.” People who’d converted as adults would talk about the other witnesses who had brought “the truth” to them. The term, I assume, came from the primary piece of literature the Witnesses used as Bible Study material in the door to door work for many years, this little blue book titled “The Truth that leads to Eternal Life.”

I can look at that cover and the graphic design part of me says the all caps on the top and bottom lines are acting as a frame and that there’s not necessarily any rhetorical importance to that choice and the emotional part of me says this book is promising something big. THE TRUTH. Not a truth or some truth. THE truth. And so we called this “the truth book.”

Because I was raised in the church, I’ll never be able to know what it felt like for someone who came from a different tradition to look at that book or at some other piece of Witness literature and feel like a whole new world has opened to them. It was the only world I knew until I started looking outside of it. And maybe that’s part of the reason why I wasn’t very successful at bringing people “into the truth,” because I’d never had to grapple with anything else. My entire worldview was based on those teachings. I had grown up in “the truth” and I knew it intimately by the time I was a teenager.

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That meant I was great at talking to fellow Witnesses about doctrine and faith and the minutiae of scripture. That was all in my wheelhouse. What wasn’t in my wheelhouse? Anything else. The world. You name it. I had all the confidence in the universe that I knew what was really going on because I had “the truth” and as backup? Anytime I came across something that challenged that truth, I had the church teaching that when something disagrees with our translation of the Bible, our faith tells us that we’re right and to doubt that is to doubt God.

And you wouldn’t doubt God, would you? Or the humans put in place to represent Him on earth? You wouldn’t want to do that because the repercussions are major if you do.

How major? The Jehovah’s Witnesses practice (practiced? I don’t know anymore because I left in 1996) shunning members who’ve left the faith. Their term is “disfellowshipping,” and it’s based on the idea that unrepentant sinners pollute the congregation, even family, and that it’s more important to keep the congregation clean than it is to maintain contact with them. Also, there’s the possibility that by expelling them, they’ll see the error of their ways and come back to the faith. (I wish I could tell you that tactic didn’t work, but I saw it happen a lot.)

That’s what happened with me. In my mind, I left the church sometime in the spring of 1995. I was 26, and it was my first semester in college and no surprise, I’d gotten some reading assignments from a couple of professors that challenged my worldview, specifically in my Zoology 101 class. We had to do some research into the fossil Australopithecus Afarensis, aka Lucy, an early hominid. The Witnesses are old earth creationists, which is to say they believe God created animals and humans pretty much the way it’s described in Genesis, so no evolution, but that the meaning of “day” is flexible enough that it could handle the concept of dinosaurs living millions of years ago. Slightly less crazy than young earth creationists who believe fossils were planted in the ground by Satan to test our faith. The more I read the research I found in the university library, the more I realized that this version of evolution was nothing like the description of evolution I had learned from Witness texts, and that it made a lot more sense than old earth creationism.

There’s more to the story of my turn away from Damascus, but a lot of that is personal and involves people who haven’t asked to be part of this story so I’m not going to tell it here. But that was the first step, I think, and the reason it mattered is because “the truth” was a really well constructed facade which depended utterly on not questioning any individual piece of it, because if you start to ask questions, you quickly discover there aren’t any answers beyond “you should pray more to strengthen your faith.” Once I saw that the Witnesses had been fudging things (to be kind) about evolution, I started to wonder what else they’d been fudging about and it turned out to be a lot.

And so I left. I stopped identifying as a Witness. I stopped attending meetings. I started trying to live the life of a “worldly” person, or at least what had been presented to me as what worldly life was like. (Spoiler alert: there was a lot less fornication involved than I had been led to believe. There was some, don’t get me wrong, but I’d been hoping to make up for lost time and that didn’t happen. There was a lot more alcohol consumption, though, to be fair.) I hoped that the relationship between me and the local congregation could be “live and let live.”

But it couldn’t. As it happens, one of my turns toward the worldly had involved taking up smoking (which was dumb, I quit a long time ago) and bartending, and apparently someone connected to the congregation saw me with a smoke and told the local elders who showed up at my apartment sometime around Christmas to ask me if I wanted to come meet with them and explain my situation. I told them that there wasn’t really much point in that. I didn’t tell them that my then-girlfriend was asleep in my bed and that I had a massive Christmas tree up in my living room. I don’t know for certain if the Witnesses have a hierarchy of disfellowshippable offenses, but I suspect that if they do, both of those come in above the occasional Pall Mall.

I’ve told this story so many times over the years that it feels flippant now, but the truth is that I was rocked by that meeting, because I knew what it meant. I was going to be cut off.

The idea of being cut off from Witness friends didn’t really affect me much. Those relationships had pretty much ended once I quit going to the Kingdom Hall. It was the family connections that were tough, because I knew I was going to lose them forever. Because I knew I wasn’t going back.

See, I left because I didn’t believe anymore. I didn’t think it was “the truth.” At that point, I didn’t believe in any singular truth anymore. I still don’t. I mostly just try not to be a shitty human. I had kind of figured out an option if I wanted to maintain those relationships on their terms. Bear with me because this is convoluted. In order to be reinstated to the congregation, you have to show public repentance. I was also about to graduate from college and I knew I’d be leaving Hammond to go to grad school, so I could conceivably go back to the Kingdom Hall and go through the motions long enough to be reinstated then move somewhere where the local Witnesses didn’t know me and just resume the life I wanted to live. That would give my parents the loophole they needed to be part of my life. I won’t speak for them and say they’d have gone along with it, but it would have been there.

I maybe considered doing that for 3 minutes and then said no. The fact was that I liked the life I was leading. But more importantly, I didn’t want to lie to my parents about who I was. I didn’t want to give them false hope. One of my favorite moments in Huck Finn is when Huck says “you can’t pray a lie” and “all right then, I’ll go to hell.” Admittedly, it’s a little easier to say you’ll go to hell when you’ve never believed in one (a doctrinal difference between the Witnesses and most other Christian churches), but it’s not like I wasn’t going to pay for this decision in very real, emotional ways. I’m still paying for it today, but I’ve never regretted that choice.

That’s what this section of Reclamation digs into, the power of doubt and what you can gain from it and what it can cost you. The line from Frost’s poem that this section centers around is “possessed by what you now no more possess” and in “The Gift Outright” Frost is talking about how the British colonists in what would become the US still felt like they were British citizens even as they pulled away, even as they were forming families and cities and, to be fair, committing genocide and enslaving people as well. In my retelling, this line is all about questions, about what possibilities they can open to you and also what precious things they can cost you.

Reclamation Part 7

Imagine childhood filled with secret knowledge
and the command to share it. Imagine
knowing this world will end in your lifetime,
likely before you finish high school. though
no one knows the day or the hour. Then
imagine your first doubt, how you’re no longer
possessed by what you now no more possess,
that certainty which carried you past several
styles of sin. Imagine something more
than loss: a Batman kite, finally in flight,
torn from your ten-year old hands by wind;
a babysitter who makes you pray for
God’s pardon after each time she rapes you;
your father dying with dementia just
days after your first phone call in fifteen
years, no way to make it home.

Thanks for reading. I promise that the next section doesn’t get as dark as this one.

A while back my oldest daughter Brittany asked me to make her a shawl for her wedding. She chose the pattern and then proceeded to get married much sooner than planned for reasons, which is fine. They’re having a party/reception next year which is when the shawl will officially debut.

I got the yarn for it when I was in Japan earlier this year co-leading a study abroad course for the College of Engineering. I bought it from a shop in Tokyo called Daruma—you can read about them here—and I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s the most pleasant yarn I’ve ever worked with.

As you’ve probably gathered from the photo, it’s not finished. I bought more than the pattern said I would need and did a swatch and everything to make sure I was using the correct hook (not what I usually do) but not enough. I’m on row 62 of 64. When it started to become obvious I didn’t have enough, I went online to the store, found the correct yarn, and ordered some. Sure it would be a little pricier than usual to ship it to the US, but not outrageous.

Except no. Because the Trump administration did away with the de minimis exemption, thus requiring tariffs on everything, no matter how small, Daruma decided (and I get it) that it’t not worth it to ship individual orders to the US anymore. Well, shit.

BUT!!! Amy was awarded a Fulbright earlier this year so we’re going to be relocating to Romania, the city of Iași specifically, for the coming school year. And Daruma will ship to Romania, so I can order it once we’re settled there and finish the shawl. The day is saved!

Did I bury the real news there? Yeah a bit. We’re moving to Romania in roughly a month and will be there a year. Amy busted her ass to win this honor and I couldn’t be more proud of her. There’s a lot of upheaval right now around it as you might imagine. We’ve had to re-home some animals and we’re converting our home of nearly 12 years into a short term rental, which means removing most of what makes a place a home and replacing it with bland functionality.

This also means I had to take a leave of absence from my paying job, because they weren’t willing to let me teach remotely from Europe, which fair I guess. I turned in my last set of grades for the semester earlier today. I have a couple of other things to do connected to that and then I’ll be pseudo-unemployed, which brings me to the title of this post.

I’m planning a new project, hopefully one with money attached. I’m starting a Patreon for this new project, which is tentatively titled “Eating Popeye’s In Romania,” and the early plan is to write and maybe make videos about our experiences in Romania for the coming year. I’m using Popeye’s as one of the lenses for this project because it’s been a running joke for me ever since I left Louisiana in 1999 that the first thing I look for in a new place is to see if there’s a Popeye’s. Sometimes I think the hardest part of the 4 years I did at Arkansas for my MFA wasn’t the workshops, it was the lack of spicy fried chicken and dirty rice that I didn’t make myself.

So it was kind of a surprise to learn that Popeye’s has opened a number of places in Romania, including multiple restaurants in Iași. I searched for it as a joke and found multiple stories about how Popeye’s entered Romania 4 years ago and already has 22 stores and plans to open more. I’m not saying that I’m going to turn this into a quest to eat at every one of the locations (though if Popeyes in Romania is looking to sponsor me, I’m happy to talk). But the food I grew up with has always been important to me, and Popeye’s was the first local fast food chain I experienced. The first store opened in New Orleans not long before we moved to Louisiana, and I have strong memories of eating at the one in Slidell in the parking lot of the K&B Drugstore with my sister and parents before going to the Kingdom Hall.

I still have a lot to do to get the Patreon up and running. I’m posting this today mostly as a way to kick myself in the ass and get it done. But rest assured I’ll be posting more details as it starts to round into shape.

Next post will be about another poem to love, though, I promise.

It’s a poem about a challenging subject, in case you’re thinking about clicking on that link. The title is “To Karen, Who Molested Me,” and while in most cases it’s a good idea to keep some distance as a reader between the I of the poem and the person of the poet, that’s not necessary in this case. The Me in the title is me, and Karen is indeed the name of the babysitter who, when I was 4-5, molested me in our little red and white trailer in Angleton, Texas, the one in the trailer park that had a tree I could climb a little and shells for the road and for a while an empty lot beside it that I played in with my sister.

I’ve written about this for years, about the experience and the memory and the questions that come up when you discover that things you know you remember couldn’t have possibly happened when they did—for example, I have a strong connection in my head between being molested and the song “Love Will Keep Us Together” by The Captain and Tennille even though the song came out well at least a year after it ended—and how that can make you question everything else.

And of course I’ve talked about this with my therapist for many years now as well, about how triggers work and how to learn to cope with them. I don’t have a panic attack when I hear that song anymore and I have accepted that memory can be imperfect and still true on important matters. Some of that is in the poem, which is a modification of a form I’ve always loved writing in.

The sestina, if you’re not steeped in this kind of lore, is a form from the French that uses repeated end words in a particular pattern to form a rhetorical circle of sorts. The stanzas are six lines long which means there are only six end words for the entirety of the poem, which is 39 lines long. If you were to keep the poem going in the same pattern after the first six stanzas, the seventh would see the end words back where they began, and some sestinas will have those end words appear in that order in the 3-line envoi that ends the form. The effect traditionally is that the poem deals with memory and reminiscence. The repetitiveness of the end words along with the length of the poem pushes both the reader and the poet in that direction.

But I didn't want this poem to end up where it started. Or maybe it’s that I wanted to push back on memory and this experience, so I messed with the form.

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In the traditional sestina, the end word of the last line of a stanza repeats immediately as the end word of the first line of the next stanza, so I decided to try swapping out that end word with an antonym, and then keeping it in there for the rest of the poem. By the time I got to the envoi, all the end words had been exchanged for some version of their opposite. The poem starts as a letter to my abuser remembering those moments and ends with the time when I started to tell other people that it had happened. There’s movement from victim toward agency, even though it’s the first halting steps in that direction. Other readers are in a better place to say how well I did it or if the form works at all, but that’s where I was coming from in the poem.

It’s a happy coincidence that this happened right when I started reading Chelsea Rathburn’s new book just out from LSU Press, Broken Houses. (If this sort of thing matters to you, I’ve known Chelsea since our MFA days in the early 21st century at the University of Arkansas.) I think it’s a terrific book overall, and part of that comes from knowing the places she writes about—she’s from south Florida, as is my wife and her family—and that recognition of places and experiences does a lot for me as a reader.

But the poem I want to hone in on is one that, from what I can tell, hasn’t been published anywhere else (though if I’m wrong, let me know and I’ll fix the attribution here). It’s titled “What Do We Do When the Old Monsters Die” and it also serves as the first line of the poem. Here’s the question as a whole.

What Do We Do When the Old Monsters Die

not the ghouls we dreamed under our beds
but the ones who crept in, nails sharp as rakes,
the real ones who swayed over their forks and plates
or lodged inside our heads?  

And what struck me the moment I read this was how “over their forks and plates” makes this immediate and personal. I want to be clear, I don’t have any reason to believe that Rathburn here is talking about child sexual abuse—that’s the lens I bring to this for obvious reasons—but it reinforces the reality that when it comes to child abuse in general, it’s way more likely to come from a family member or friend than from a stranger, someone who would have been a guest at dinner more than once perhaps.

The next line is heartbreaking. “So many nights / we kept on the lights and tried to make ourselves / small.” That desire to hide, that hope that if you are just quiet enough then nothing bad will happen.

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The poem doesn’t leave us in that moment, though. The poem’s title asks “what do we do when the old monsters die” but the rest of the poem asks “what about before they die but after we’re beyond their reach?” The poem supposes a monster who is facing death and is trying to get right with god.

what do we do when our wishes come true
and their poor hearts or lungs or livers fail
and they say they've found Jesus and cry out 
Forgive us Forgive us Forgive us (we're told)
but we still won't answer our phones or open
their mail? (Is it true we're cruel and cold?)

I really like the choice of “us” versus “me” in that line because it seems like it’s never just one. It would be nice for it to be just one, I think. But the real power is in the plea from the monster begging forgiveness and apparently claiming the speaker is cruel and cold for not being willing to engage.

This isn’t a scenario I’ll ever get to deal with. Fortunately, my abuse ended not terribly long after it started. One of my aunts moved in with us for a while and took over the child care duties, and then we moved to Louisiana, far away from Karen. I don’t know if she’s still alive or if she ever thought twice about that time. It’s taken a lot of work for me but I don’t even try to imagine it anymore. I’ve accepted that it’s unknowable. But I can say that in some alternate universe where Karen shows up 50+ years later and demands forgiveness out of the blue that it’s not cruel to deny that. Even when a person who has harmed you has done real work to atone and change, you don’t owe them forgiveness.

But that’s rarely how it happens, isn’t it?

The second section of Rathburn’s poem restates the opening question but moves it back in time from “when the old monsters die” to “when the monsters grow thin / their eyes sunken in, and we cannot stand to join the rest, to pat the jaundiced hands?” and also starts to poke at the social pressure that we can get from, for instance, extended family or members of a community, to let grievances go when it’s clear that the monster is about to die or at least has lost some of the ability they once had to cause direct harm. The next lines talk of the monster being “stripped / of their claws and fangs and look, in the end / like ordinary old women and men” and I think that impulse is understandable, especially for someone who maybe wasn’t the direct recipient of harm, who only heard stories or suspected but never really knew.

And if you’re the person being pressured, subtly or overtly, to forgive, that can hurt a lot, as though your experiences weren’t as bad as you thought they were or worse, that you are in fact the monster because, as someone at the service says “They were so kind / to me, they were always, always so kind.” But as anyone with experience with abusers will tell you, abusers aren’t terrible to everyone. They cultivate non-abusive relationships as a way to have a buffer when or if their victims ever speak up.

That this part of the poem happens at a funeral is also important, because 1) that’s when emotions are running high and 2) it’s taboo to speak ill of the person in the box (or urn as the case may be). The cultural requirement that we not disrespect the feelings of the mourners is strong, no matter how much harm they did in their lives, and it can leave the victim feeling not only alone, but betrayed to see people who know the harm they did either minimizing it or denying it outright in that moment.

I’ve received permission from Chelsea to run the poem in its entirety here, as it hasn’t been published elsewhere except for in her new book, which you should definitely read.

What Do We Do When the Old Monsters Die

not the ghouls we dreamed under our beds
but the ones who crept in, nails sharp as rakes,
the real ones who swayed over their forks and plates
or lodged inside our heads? So many nights
we kept on the lights and tried other make ourselves
small. So many times we wished them dead. Now
what do we do when our wishes come true
and their poor hearts or lungs or livers fail
and they say they've found Jesus and cry out
Forgive us Forgive us Forgive us (we're told)
but we still won't answer our phones or open
their mail? (Is it true we're cruel and cold?)

What do we do when the monsters grow thin,
their eyes sunken in, and we cannot stand
to join the rest, to pat the jaundiced hands?
What will we have left when they are stripped
of their claws and fangs, and look, in the end,
like ordinary old women or men?
At the service, someone will cry, They were so kind
to me, they were always, always so kind—
We'd roll our eyes. It's best we don't attend.

I could say a lot more about this poem, about the form and how it creates this tension between such a personal, visceral subject and the formal stiffness that emanates from the rhymes and the iambic pentameter. About how there are only three non-questions in the whole thing and they’re all short and direct compared to these winding, complex questions that make up the bulk of the poem. But if I did that, there’d be so much less for everyone else to talk about.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this poem in the comments. Thanks as always for sticking with me this long.

Bravery is complicated for me. I grew up during the Cold War. When I was in second grade, a new kid in a new school in a new state, far from everywhere I’d known and all my extended family, a substitute teacher informed the class that in the event of a nuclear war, New Orleans (where at least one parent of pretty much everyone in the class and both of mine worked) would be one of the Soviet Union’s top five targets because of its importance as a shipping port. And then we practiced getting under our desks in case the siren went off, because they would protect us from fallout and radiation or something.

If I had to guess, I’d say that substitute teacher thought he was doing us all a favor, getting us ready for the harsh realities of the real world. Or maybe he figured that if he had to walk us through an exercise in futility we should at least know why we were doing it. I don’t remember him telling us to be brave, but also we were practicing for a danger that even now feels different from the daily violence of our lives.

Violence for me back then was schoolyard bullies and corporal punishment both at home and school. It was slapstick humor and wild west shootouts and athletes breaking their bodies against each other on live tv. It was “swing on your bully and he’ll back down” and “let them fight it out.” Bravery was measured in your willingness to risk getting your ass beat in public.

The stories I read and saw at that age fit a couple of basic molds when it came to violence. Mostly it was authority using violence to stop bad things from happening to those it protected, and when it involved rebellion against that authority, the ones in charge were caricatures of oppression and/or corruption.

Sports also normalized this violence, whether it was boxers trying to take each other’s heads off or professional wrestlers playing face and heel in sweaty soap operas, pitchers sending a message with a fastball to the ribs and batters charging the mound after being knocked down. It was football players with nicknames like Assassin and Hacksaw who were famous for the damage they did to opposing players.

It even extended to the natural world. I can’t say I went out of my way to watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom regularly but my impression of the show is that at least once per episode some big cat was chasing down a deer. It always felt noble, the graceful cheetah exploding with speed after a gazelle and no matter how many times the gazelle changed directions, finally the cheetah would get hold of it and it was over.

Sometimes they were contrasted with hyenas or jackals, who hunted in packs and picked off the weak or sickly members of the herd. They were sneakier, and even worse, they were carrion eaters, picking at the remains of what other stronger and more beautiful predators had left behind.

Sometimes the prey escaped. They were too fast; the predator had alerted them to its presence early or had underestimated how long it would take to tire them out. But there was always the feeling like the gazelle was delaying the inevitable.

I’ve never identified with the predatory part of the world, though no doubt some people would see me as connected to it. That’s a level of complication I’m not trying to get into at the moment. I’m saying that if there’s a lion and a gazelle, I’m probably going to feel I have more in common with the gazelle, mostly interested in avoiding confrontation when possible. I haven’t swung on another person since I was in junior high school, and even when I was a bartender in college, I focused on separating people who were fighting. I’d be quite content with never striking another human being in anger for the rest of my life.

Some people hear that and connect it to cowardice and more importantly, to an unwillingness to fight or defend themselves should the need arise. We’ve seen that recently with the confused responses by many in our government and on the political right to the organic resistance that’s sprung up in multiple cities to the kidnapping of our neighbors by government agents. They were surprised to see regular people be brave and say no and put their bodies between their neighbors and the outsiders who had come to take them away. They thought of themselves as the lions and the locals as zebras who would run away the minute fangs were bared. They were wrong.

The opening poem of Dan Albergotti’s collection Candy (LSU Press 2024) is what got me thinking of our current moment in these terms. The title is “Kick in the Jaw” and it opens with the line “Sometimes the zebra wins.” That’s kind of a jarring line if you don’t know much about zebras. It’s a common mistake to think they’re similar to horses in temperament because they’re part of the same family, but no zebra has ever been domesticated. They’re too aggressive. But even if you know that about zebras, it’s still an interesting contrast to Albergotti’s next lines. Here are the first four together.

	Sometimes the zebra wins. And the sound

	of the savanna goes on—birdsong, frog croak,

	beetle chitter, snort and grunt of a warthog

	hard panting of the cheetah after chase—

Sometimes the zebra wins and nothing is different. It’s as much a part of the natural world as the predator winning. Even the cheetah in this scene isn’t feeding. It’s panting, gathering its energy for the next attempt. But if the zebra just managed to dodge the cheetah for now, that doesn’t seem like much of a win. The poem continues:

	as the lion walks slowly away, bleeding from

	the mouth, staring ahead, looking for a place

	to rest and await a slow starvation. Sometimes

	the savanna’s ambient song is interrupted

	by a sharp crack that sounds like a gunshot,

	the zebra’s kick finding the lion’s jaw.

I’d be anthropomorphizing to say that the zebra is brave here. This is just nature, cruel and violent. The zebra kicks because it can and it connected with the lion and more often than not, the lion is probably going to win this encounter and it doesn’t mean anything larger than that. Albergotti says as much in the final lines:

	Some stories get rewritten. Sometimes

	the lion dies. Always the sound goes on.

It’s the first two sentences there that really grabbed me, and it’s why this poem has stuck with me and why I decided to write about it. “Some stories get rewritten. Sometimes the lion dies.” Just because you’re not a predator that doesn’t mean you’re destined to lose no matter how much the predator wins in the stories. Sometimes the zebra breaks the lion’s jaw.

Notice that the world doesn’t end when the lion’s jaw is broken. It will end for that lion, but there are other lions. It will eventually end for that zebra, but there are other zebras.

I’d bet that Dan didn’t have any particular political or war-type situation in mind when he wrote this poem. I’m stretching this metaphor pretty tautly, mostly because I need to remind myself that no situation is hopeless, that there’s always a sound in the background continuing, and that I can find a way to be brave if I remember that.

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I’m going to preface my thoughts here by saying I’m focusing exclusively on large language models and generative AI and how I think they’re negatively affecting teaching and learning in a college environment. I’m not going to get into other forms of machine learning or use cases for LLMs generally or the ethics of using tools which have been trained on artists work with neither permission or compensation, or the crazy amounts of resources they use to generate their content. I’m also not going to make any portents of doom, though I am going to share this image I saw online earlier today.

Before I get into what my problems are with the ways I’m seeing LLMs introduced into the classroom, I want to talk some about what I think teaching is all about, about what I’m trying to accomplish in my classroom full of college students learning about technical communication.

When I think about my own time as a student, first as a chemistry major and then as an English major and graduate student, I tend to separate what I learned into data and skills. I learned what the atomic number of oxygen was and how to light a Bunsen burner. I learned who TS Eliot was and how to read his poems. I think that’s pretty common.

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The latter category, the how part, the skills, often gets a lot of attention from people who equate getting a college degree with getting a job. They often reduce college to learning skills for the workplace. I say it to my students every semester when I’m telling them why they’re doing a group project. It’s because employers want employees who know how to work together efficiently. Other departments also tailor what they teach and how they teach it based on what employers tell them they want.

And there’s a logic to that. College is expensive, students are often going into debt for this degree which has a history of leading to higher earnings over the course of their lives, and employers would prefer to hire people who don’t need a lot of remedial training to become productive cogs in their machines. There’s a reason why the claim that college is a form of job training makes a kind of sense.

Except that college isn’t job training. Think back to the kinds of skills you learned in college. I’ll use the chemistry lab example since that was my major for a couple of years before calculus convinced me my future involved less math and more words. Had I completed my degree and gotten a job as a chemist, no doubt some of what I learned in my labs would be very useful, but not in a job training way. For example, learning how to safely operate a chemical hood is pretty basic stuff, but the chances that I would be using the same hood in my workplace that I did in my college class are pretty close to zero. And my employer would know that going in. What they’d expect me to know is more like “when and why should I use a hood” and “what is likely to happen if I violate safety protocols?” How to use the specific hood would be covered in training and documentation.

This is an important distinction because in college, we don’t tend to teach students how to do things. In pretty much every field, what you learn in school is the underlying architecture of your field, how things work and why, so that when you get a job you can figure out how these other things work more quickly. You have to be able to figure out new things because the ground shifts so quickly.

Sometimes what you’re learning is how to use new technology. When I started my current teaching job, I had to learn how to use Canvas (in a hurry—I was hired as a sub after the semester started and took over a class the day after I got my laptop) after never having used a course management system before.

Sometimes you have to adjust to bigger changes. Lawyers have to adjust to changes in law on the fly all the time, whether it’s due to changes made legislatively or administratively or by judges who decide something isn’t constitutional anymore. If they depended on what they’d learned the law was in law school, they’d be terrible at their jobs. Doctors, accountants, engineers, historians, archaeologists, psychologists, you name it. Every field evolves and these days, evolves rapidly, and you have to adjust to it.

My point here is that what we learned in school was not how to do things per se but how to solve problems in specialized fields and how to adapt to new information and discoveries.

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Some smartass is going to read this and think “yeah so LLMs are just the newest thing to adapt to, get over it boomer” to which I will say first, I’m GenX motherfucker and second, I’m getting to that.

One of the reasons students and graduates both have reason to accept the metaphor of college as job training is because we kind of sell it to them that way in how we approach assessment. I have my students produce a series of documents that I put grades and comments on and based on how they execute those documents, they get a grade at the end of the semester which determines whether or not they progress toward their degree. Maybe it affects their financial aid, a scholarship. Maybe it affects their visa status if they’re from another country. No matter how much I tell my students that the truly important thing is whether or not they learn how to respond effectively to an audience or translate complicated technical subjects into clear language for non-experts, to them the grade can be more important because it can impact them in very concrete ways.

So it has never been a surprise to see students try to find ways to skip the work and get a high-quality finished product. They think, with reason, that the essay, the lab report, the exam is the important thing, no matter how much we may emphasize that the real value is in learning the underlying basics of their field, in learning the how and why of it.

LLM companies feed into this more than any other kind of tech I’ve seen, even more than online paper mills. At least paper mills make no pretense of what they’re doing. They don’t sell themselves as a tool for you to use. They’re very transactional.

LLM companies say what they’re providing are tools for greater productivity and creativity. It’s possible that for some subset of users, they are, though most of the claims I’ve seen to that effect are pretty dubious, and there have been more than a few studies that have shown that they reduce connection to the text they’re used to create and can undermine the skills of experienced users with continued use.

But our students aren’t experienced users, not in their fields. That’s why they’re students. They’re supposed to be getting baseline knowledge and skills in their specializations here so that they’ll be prepared to adapt to changes in their fields for years to come. And there’s no way to bypass the work that’s necessary to gain those skills.

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When I lecture about this to my students, one of the things I mention is that if they use an LLM to generate text for an assignment and then don’t get the grade they think it deserves, they’re going to have a hard time understanding why and how it fell short. To be clear: this is not about academic dishonesty or plagiarism. Unless a students admits to me that they used an LLM to complete an assignment or left the prompt in there (which some of my colleagues have had happen), the chances I could build a case against them that would get sanctions at the university level are pretty low. And I don’t want to do that. I’m not a cop and I try not to act like one.

They’re going to have a hard time getting why and how their document fell short because they lack a fundamental understanding of how language works. They haven’t practiced enough to have muscle memory for it yet. LLMs are powerful machines and we’re being told that they require no training to operate, but it seems like every day there’s another story about a lawyer being called before a judge for submitting a brief full of hallucinated cases or worse, people saying they’re in love with their AI partner or substituting a chatbot for a therapist and spiraling into depression or worse.

What I’ve seen suggested in some places is that we need to be the ones who train our students how to use these tools. Drivers Ed for LLMs, I guess. I think that presumes our students are experienced enough to be able to use them effectively, and I don’t think that’s accurate and I teach mostly second and third year college students. I heard from a friend of mine with kids slightly older than my twins that teachers in middle school are using these tools in the classroom and that’s outrageous to me. That’s like giving the car keys to someone who can’t reach the pedals yet, and the car is all engine and no brakes.

I highly recommend this piece from Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic titled “AI is a Mass Delusion Event” for more on this. Thanks for sticking with me this long.

I’m ten or so. We’ve just moved from Big Branch, which the map calls an unincorporated area but which I call the woods, to Slidell, which feels like the city to me. It’s not. It’s a suburb, and not a particularly big one. It’s maybe 20,000 people at the time, not much bigger now. But we had neighbors who didn’t raise ducks next door and paved streets instead of gravel ones that were occasionally washed out so badly that we’d have to walk half a mile to catch the school bus. My classmates lived a block away and there were convenience stores we could get to with our bikes.

But the woods are right there too.

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Past the trailer park, down Possum Hollow Road, about where it turned from paved to gravel, in the days before they built the assisted living community at the bend to the left and paved it all, there were woods. I didn’t go into them often because it would have only been me doing it, and I was worried I’d get lost in there and besides, there were books to read and old cartoons and What’s Happening! reruns and you never knew when they might show the 2-parter with the Doobie Brothers or the one where ReRun joins a cult based around a head of lettuce. But mostly it was because I didn’t explore alone.

I’ve written about this area before, how Pine Street dead-ended into a wall of trees behind which was a canal, then more trees and then more Pine Street beyond it. For a while there was a rope the more adventurous used to swing across the canal, but then the rope broke and most of us wouldn’t swing on it anyway because if you fell in the canal you mostly got muddy and who knew what kind of garbage was lining the bottom of it and that basically ended your day because there was no way you’d be allowed to wreck two sets of clothes in a day, not when someone else was doing the laundry.

Fortunately there were more woods near where we stayed during the summer. There were two Witness families with kids around our ages and one stay-at-home mom and so we all just kind of ran riot from June until late August.

On the other end, Pine Street extended three blocks before it became gravel. About a block down, Billy’s family owned probably 5 acres and lived in an old house they were forever working on set back a couple hundred yards from the street. They had a long driveway and we would build ramps out of whatever scrap plywood and bricks or cinder blocks we could find and jump bikes off of them. Most of the time when we entered the woods, we went from his back yard.

That’s where we went fishing. Back then you could get a cane pole for a buck or two at TG&Y and someone’s dad always had a tackle box and we’d take turns contributing hooks or sinkers or floats we’d bought or lifted to each other’s rigs. We’d dig for earthworms, put them in a coffee can brimming with tetanus and head for Gar Creek or Perch Pond, and we caught the same fish over and over, always too small to keep.

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Does that sound romantic? I suppose it does. It’s hard to write about your childhood from this remove without slipping into nostalgia. This is the kind of experience so many people of my generation and the one before it recount almost automatically when they want to rant about how younger people aren’t allowed to take chances or explore on their own and how everything is planned out for them and how we’ve lost something in the process.

And like most nostalgic exaggerations, there’s a bit of truth to it. We learned a lot about ourselves in those moments, that we could dig a fish hook out of our own legs with a pocket knife, that the newsstand just past the Winn Dixie threw porn magazines with the covers torn off into the dumpster every so often and that if you were going to bury them in the woods, you needed to wrap them in plastic against the rain and mark the tree next to the hole clearly or you’d never find them again, that there was one lady at the A&P who would sell you cigarettes if you told her you were buying them for your dad, assuming you had the money to buy them. We taught ourselves how to make flame throwers out of aerosol cans and Bic lighters with the fuel governors torn out of them, and how to hide first and second degree burns from our parents.

We hid stuff and our parents mostly didn’t ask unless we gave them a reason to and I don’t actually know if that was normal or not. Like how Mike sold his mom’s lawnmower to buy muscle relaxers off a guy who’d quit school the year before. She asked about that, naturally.

They mostly didn’t ask because their parents hadn’t asked them about what they’d gotten up to when they were young and also because they were working a lot and had long commutes and culturally we hadn’t internalized that maybe it’s not the safest thing to leave pre-teens in charge of even pre-er-teens for hours and also that maybe we should vet the adults who are really interested in hanging out with all these pre-teens a little more closely. Because there were a lot of things we didn’t talk about publicly, or among our extended families, or even admit to ourselves for a long time.

But we talked to each other. Because what else are you going to do when you’re only with each other all day, no other distractions. We weren’t talking about the big issues of the day or about the meaning of life, but we talked. Shit, mostly.

At the Kingdom Hall, my dad and the others talked a lot about our universal brotherhood, and we heard stories about Witnesses in other parts of the world undergoing incredible persecution for maintaining their faith and upholding their values. We read about how Witnesses tool each other in even when they hadn’t met before. And I’d seen that firsthand too. My parents walked the talk on that, and we’d spent nights in the homes of fellow Witnesses we’d never met before based only on our shared faith.

But even so, when you’re young, it’s hard to internalize that wider sense of belonging other than as an abstraction. Everything else is so immediate. Did I put the last banana on my Cheerios yesterday? Is it beach movie week on Channel 6? Will Job’s big sister be laying out in their back yard again covered in baby oil? Does the 9-volt in my transistor radio have any charge left in it?

If there’s ever anything I’m nostalgic for, it’s that. It’s being able to focus just on what’s around me, not worried about the future or even knowing what the future really is.

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I’m making a big assumption here, so please tell me if I’m wrong about this, but I think being a Jehovah’s Witness made this inability to imagine the future worse. Here’s what I mean.

It was a fundamental part of my upbringing that I probably wouldn’t become an adult before Armageddon happened. I heard my parents say more than once that they were surprised my sister and I even started school, much less finished it. The end was always right there. The signs were so clear, and the calculations about when the last days began were right there, and if you’ve never been a person so deeply embedded in a faith that this kind of thing makes sense, then congratulations to you, but there’s a whole bunch of us—I’ve seen the term ex-vangelical used and I think it fits me at least—who recognize the form the language takes, if not the specific details of that doctrine. One of the more surprising things I discovered was how many people from very different faith backgrounds used the same or very similar terms to describe our relationship to both our churches and those not in them. The first time I heard a non-JW use the term “worldly” to describe someone not in their church, I nearly did a spit-take, because the whole deal for being a JW was that we were different from everyone else, and the only ones who had it right, and even though I’d been out of the church for years at that point, I hadn’t internalized that the differences were pretty small.

Sorry for the digression. So why it’s worse for Witnesses, or maybe was for me. One big thing that is different for the Witnesses is the belief that instead of paradise being heaven, it’s on earth. It’s gonna take some work to make it happen, but once Armageddon wipes out all the bad people, the ones who are left, combined with the ones who are resurrected, will be able to transform the earth back into Eden. How? No idea. But questions are for doubters, and doubters are not allowed.

Now if you believe in this but also believe that the end is far off, that it’s something that will never happen in your lifetime, then you still have to think about things like jobs and housing and maybe even retirement, possibly passing something down to your offspring. But if you believe the end is happening any second now, well, no need to think about that stuff. All your energies need to be put toward the preaching and conversion work, toward getting the word out so that everyone at least had a chance to accept the TRUTH about Jehovah and Jesus Christ. All you need are the necessities, and to remember that some of your brothers and sisters don’t even have those. It’s a very “live in the now” faith system.

And when I was a kid, the now not only meant the present day. There was a geographic now. Now was bounded by where I was allowed to go as well as where I was able to go by myself. I couldn’t ride my Huffy to New Orleans. I couldn’t even get it out to the lake shore. I had access to about 20 square blocks and the woods behind it, both around our trailer and on Pine Street. That was my personal universe, where I lived and grew and became.

It’s been a minute since I posted anything at all here, even longer for this series. Here’s the most recent post on this long poem/response to Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright,“ and you can find the others just by looking for Reclamation. There are 16 sections in total for me to write about. I hope to get back into the groove of writing about them and other poems.

Here’s the sixth section of Reclamation.

Let’s back up a minute, to before          
my teachers did what Larkin said parents
do to their kids even if they don’t mean it,
back to pine woods and Zebco rods and reels
and perch ponds we claimed as public land,
possessing what we were still unpossessed by,
lacking even the language of belonging
to something larger than kin, congregation,
each other. The universe might as well
have fit into where we could walk to
and back in time for the next meal without
getting too thirsty. No time to worry
about what jobs we’d have in this life;
they’d be temporary, since the End Times
were here and we’d be on to reclaiming
Paradise, forever to get it done.

Thanks as always for reading. I’d love to hear your stories about the universes that formed you.

It’s not so much a play on as an explaining the joke of the Half-Fast Walking Club, led by jazz musician Pete Fountain until his death in 2016. I have been a half-fast walker (among other things) for much of my life, especially as I’ve gotten older, so while I have never been a member of the Krewe, I feel a hard kinship with them. If anyone in central Iowa sees this and wants to start up an unofficial satellite group, hit me up, especially if you’re a Louisiana expat like me.

But this year, no matter how much Professor Longhair and Dirty Dozen Brass Band I played, I have just been having a hard time getting fully into the mode. Watching the government you grew up with and felt you kind of hand a handle on how it worked start acting like a washing machine with a bowling ball in it can do that to a person. (Go find that video if you’ve never seen it before.)

My favorite individual day of the season is always Lundi Gras, the day before the big one, and anyone who’s ever lived in or near a tourist destination can already tell you why. The big tourist days for Mardi Gras are the day itself and the Sunday before. That’s when the biggest parades run, that’s when the traditional debauchery is running at its strongest, and you gotta really want it to get out there in the middle of it, especially if you’re protective of your local flavor.

But Lundi Gras has that eye of the storm calm, where you can almost convince yourself that the tourists are all still recovering from Sunday so they won’t be yelling in your face, where you feel like you can get close to some floats and catch some throws, where even the Bible-thumpers with their big signs about all the different kinds of sins that will send you to hell are chill by their standards. It’s not safe, to be clear, but it’s not as raucous as the big storm either side of it on the calendar.

At least that’s how it was when I lived there. I’m sure it’s changed. Everything does.

But something changed yesterday for the better in my small world. My oldest daughter, also a child of the region, is a baker, and this year convinced her boss to let her try king cakes, and she brought one of the test cakes over after work yesterday and when I tell you my heart lifted and the clouds parted and the angels in midheaven sang praises, well, I’m underselling it.

Oh my god, y’all. She’s going to be doing the regular cake, and also with cream cheese and praline fillings. This was the praline, and I do believe that I would elbow an old woman in a walker to the ground to get at it if it’s the last one in the store. I hope it won’t come to that, and I also hope that y’all will have bail money for me if it does.

It’s more than just the cake though. Part of the reason I haven’t been back to Louisiana much for the season or for any part of it is because now when I go back I feel like a tourist, or maybe a half-assed tour guide. I don’t really have people there anymore.

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When I finished high school, I mostly fell out of touch with everyone I went to school with. I was a Jehovah’s Witness and they weren’t, so we were mostly friends because we were just around each other every day. The Witnesses actively discouraged making relationships with non-Witnesses, which is what most cults and cult-adjacent groups do. The idea is that members of the out group can never really understand what you believe and can only undermine your faith, so you need to avoid them.

When I got married a couple of years after that, I moved about 40 miles away where I didn’t know anyone, so all my friends were members of the church, and when I left the church six years later, well, that meant I didn’t really have anyone left that I had deep ties with. I had college friends that I made over the next three years, people I waited tables and slung drinks with, people I wrote with and so on, and I’m occasionally in touch with some of them, but I don’t feel like I could ask to crash on their couch if I was coming through town. It’s not like that with them.

So if I’m going to New Orleans or the Northshore, I mostly feel like a tourist, only instead of famous places I’m looking to see if a restaurant I used to love is still there, if I can recognize my old neighborhoods where I made questionable decisions that maybe I don’t want to explain to my kids so what are we doing here anyway there’s nothing to see who wants a sandwich?

What’s missing is family. If family isn’t there, then it can’t be home anymore, and that’s regardless of whether it’s family by blood or made family. Family is where my sister is. Family is south Florida and St. Albans and Lyon and Valence, where Amy’s people made me one of their own a long time ago. Family is in Athens, Ohio and Ithaca, New York, with some friends we don’t see often enough. Family is here in Des Moines.

But Louisiana is still home in my memory and experience and I try to keep it alive here for myself and my daughter and others. So for the next week “Claiborne Street is rocking from one side to the other / the joints are jammin’, packin’, and I’m about to smother / all because it’s carnival time.” Thank you, Al Johnson. Thank you, Gambit and Chewbacchus, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Dr. John, the Mardi Gras Indians, Miss Annie and Miss Patsy who taught me how to cook Louisiana food at Happy’s Fried Chicken and Biscuits when I was a teenager.

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Usually for these pieces I have a poem that drives what I write about in the first part, but I knew all along that I wanted to write about Mardi Gras and being separated from home, so in this case I went looking, and I had a really hard time because from what I could tell, there just aren’t a lot of poems specifically about Mardi Gras. Not according to Google, anyway, though that could be them.

On the plus side, the search meant that I discovered work by Mona Lisa Saloy, who I’d never heard of before though I really should have given that she’s a New Orleans native and a professor at Dillard and was Louisiana Poet Laureate from 2021-2023. The book this poem comes from, Red Beans and Ricely Yours, won the 2005 T.S. Eliot Prize and was published by Truman State University Press. From what I can tell, this is the only place the poem has been published, and I doubt I would have found it without this piece about it by Stacy Balkun at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

The poem’s title is “A Taste of New Orleans in Haiku.” It’s thirteen sections long, which also evokes Wallace Stevens’s “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” for me, but only on a superficial level. Saloy’s poem is rooted in place and community, in flavors and family and local language. (The book has a glossary at the end to help readers with unfamiliar terms, and while I knew most of what she wrote about, I was glad to have it there.) Her first haiku reads:

i.

Mardi Gras Indians

red beans and rice, hot sausage

dancing Second Lines

The history of the Mardi Gras Indians is too rich and complex for me to do it justice here and I’m not even going to try. Most of what I know comes from the music, because many of the krewes are performers in their own right, and the songs are filled with references to their culture. Check out The Wild Magnolias, The Wild Tchoupitoulas, Big Chief Juan Pardo, Flagboy Giz and Big Chief Monk Boudreaux just for starters.

There’s a song called Second Line which I first heard when I was in 5th grade, Brock Elementary School, and I didn’t learn until later that it was also a tradition. It’s the dance-walk back from the cemetery after a funeral, where you start to celebrate the life of the person you lost, but it also has a broader sense of any celebratory dance-walk. You second line at a parade, you second line when your football team wins, you second line when your income tax refund comes in. The heart of it is finding joy in the moment because the moment is all you know you have, so grab it now, which is something Saloy gets at in section iv.

On Mardi Gras Day

skeletons remind all folks

you might be next yeah

Years ago I wrote a poem about the places where I’d lived that I loved most and what they all had in common was this sense that they might not be here tomorrow. I was talking about New Orleans, San Francisco and Fort Lauderdale, and about natural disasters, about hurricanes and earthquakes and sea level rise. I wondered if being faced with that possibility along with the real likelihood that everyone local had lost someone to a disaster meant that we reached for reasons to celebrate whenever possible. It’s more complicated than that, especially when race is a factor, but I think at some level it’s true. Take joy where you find it.

This poem jumps in subject from haiku to haiku, and the sections about home are spread out in the poem, but I want to put some of them together here for a moment.

ii.

Allelu Sundays

giving thanks, blessings, family

panné meat dinners

vi.

Red beans and rice day

washing clothes all day Monday

add French bread, salad

vii

Butter beans Wednesdays

Barq’s root beer a midweek treat

everyone’s home

The family meal is an important part of this poem and this world. One of the problems I had with holding onto the food I loved when I moved away is that so much of it only works if you cook it for a lot of people. You can’t really make red beans or a muffuletta or fry up chicken for one or two people. It’s too much mess and the recipes don’t cut down well and it doesn’t feel the same eating it by yourself in front of the tv. You need people talking and laughing and wanting more. It can be family born or chosen, but it needs family.

And that’s where Saloy ends her poem, with her father specifically.

xiii: Haiku for Daddy

His African heart

his Creole blue eyes, light skin

his core, New Orleans

I keep rereading this last section and focusing on the way Saloy manages in so few words to connect heritage and community and family in her father and New Orleans simultaneously. Pretty much everything in this poem is a mélange, from the multiple origins and traditions that make up Mardi Gras and the revelers to the big pots of food that simmer and stew until the flavors marry and grow to the people themselves who make up the community. It’s all a complex, complicated mix. It’s delicious.

According to a couple of places, you can still get copies of Red Beans and Ricely Yours and I recommend it as a book. Saloy has a lot of great poems in here. I’m using the copy I found in the ISU library, but I plan to buy one for myself soon.

Thanks as always for reading. I’d love to hear from you about the places you’ve made home, about your connections to the place or even if, like me, you feel like you’ve lost touch with some of it. Have you made a new home? How do you feed that? I won’t lie, I could use some advice on this, I think.

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Depending on how you look at it, 20 hours is either pretty fast or really inefficient. This is the first time I’ve ever tracked how long it took me to make a sweater, or anything really, and I wonder now why I waited so long to do it, since the second most common question I get about my stuff, after “did you make it yourself?” is “how long did that take?”

I can actually answer that question in 3 ways: stopwatch time (which I did above), calendar time, and number of days. I started working on this the day after Christmas, so by the calendar it took me 2 1/2 weeks. But I didn’t work on it every day, and most days I only worked on it for maybe an hour, two max, so it took 13 individual days.

I started crocheting about 5 1/2 years ago, I guess, while rehabbing from surgery on my left elbow which I shattered after falling on ice outside my office. I did physical therapy but wanted something that I’d be able to continue once that ended, so I tried this and it took. I got a kit and a book and talked to my mother-in-law, who has crocheted for years, and when I hit a couple of walls, remembered/discovered that the best thing about YouTube, its only saving grace really, is that it’s full of videos on how to do/fix shit. And then it was on.

At first, I was not good. My stitches were uneven, some loose, some tight. I’d miss stitches, accidentally double things up. My early scarves got wider and thinner, and the edges were ragged. My stuffed animals were limp and you could see the filling between the stitches. I missed stitches and wouldn’t realize it for 3 or 4 rows. Some days it felt like I tore out as much work as I’d done or more.

But I kept at it and got better. I watched other people and tried what they tried but also kept what I did well. I experimented and some of those experiments came out great and some of them didn’t but I always learned something from the attempt.

Does it sound like I’m talking about writing too? Because I am.

A couple of months ago I was rearranging some stuff in my office and came across some notebooks from when I was in my MFA in the early 2000’s and from my undergrad days. I looked back at some of those poems and felt the expected cringe but I also saw the origins of what would become my book and the poems that followed.

One of the most valuable things I learned early on as a student in creative writing was to look at writing as a craft. It happened in my first poetry workshop, as an undergrad, with Jack Bedell. He talked about how poetry comes from the Greek word poesis, which roughly translates to “the made thing.” We read from an anthology with that title, published by the University of Arkansas Press, but more importantly we talked about the importance of writing as practice, as something you can improve at, and moved away from the idea of poet as genius with some innate ability to organically blob words out onto the page.

Which is not to say geniuses don’t exist. It’s just to say that geniuses don’t start out there. Octavia Butler didn’t write didn’t write Parable of the Sower right out of the box. It took her years of honing her craft to get there.

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It’s more important than ever to talk about this kind of work because the argument from many of AI and LLM companies, especially their CEO’s, is that these tools can let anyone become an artist, and it’s just not true.

Let me clarify. Anyone can create art and by extension become an artist. I’ll even go so far as to say that anyone can become a good artist, with the usual caveat that “good” is in the eye of the beholder.

What isn’t true is that those tools can get you out of the work it takes to get there.

One reason that tech CEOs are pushing the idea that these tools can turn anyone into an artist is they’re hoping to sell these tools to people who might believe this is the only way they can become artists, people who’ve been told that taking classes on how to paint or write or make music aren’t a good use of resources, who’ve been told that they’re left-brained and so aren’t wired to be creative, who believe that these tools will help them make money and get famous (which, ha! Anyone who thinks the path to riches comes through making art knows nothing about that world.)

Part of their argument is that it’s not fun to make art. That’s what Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno AI said recently.

"It’s not really enjoyable to make music now," he said. "It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software."

I wonder how long Shulman thought it took to make music in the days before his AI tools existed? How long it took for musicians to get good at playing their instruments, for producers and engineers and arrangers to learn how to master their equipment?

I don’t actually wonder that. It’s clear from his statement that he doesn’t know or care about the work that goes into making a song. I do expect he would be all up in his feelings if people suggested that an AI agent could do the job of Suno AI CEO better than he could because he at least has a sense of the work that went into getting there and values it as a result. “It’s way more complicated than it seems from the outside” he might say, and honestly, I’d believe him. That’s outside my knowledge and experience base.

What I do know, from every experience I’ve had as a writer, as a crocheter, as someone who plays guitar poorly and not often enough, as a teacher, is that you get better through practice and learning from experiments. No tool can shortcut that for you. I also know that there’s joy in the process, in success and failure alike.

The thing the makers of these tools are trying to sell is the idea that you can be creative without working at it, that you can ascend to genius level without any sweat. It’s the “one simple trick” sales pitch to be an artist, but there’s never “one simple trick” to succeeding at something. There’s just work, whether you’re crocheting a sweater or writing a song or running the expo window on a Friday night when a third of your wait staff called in sick and there are two new people on the line. Yes, doing that last bit well is an art too.

But also, we need to get past the idea that mega-financially-successful is the determiner of success in art. Back when we lived in San Francisco and worked at Anchor Brewing, Amy and I had a co-worker whose absolute beater of a car had a “Real Musicians Have Day Jobs” bumpersticker on it. Now I’m not here suggesting that artists who have hit it big aren’t creating amazing art. I’m not one of those “popular = bad/sellout” people. Sometimes art appeals to a big audience. Sometimes it’s niche. But the people who are selling this software are doing it by suggesting that if you use their tools, you too can be living like a king in Patagonia after just a little effort.

If that sounds like a get rich quick scheme, that’s because it is. I don’t know if the people running these companies are good at running the schemes. We’ll see how much money they walk away with when it all collapses and be able to judge then. But if they succeed, you can bet that it won’t have been because they used one simple trick. It’ll be because they worked at it long enough to get good at separating other people from their money.

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One thing that every crocheter/knitter I’ve ever talked to jokes about is the amount of yarn they buy. There is never enough. You’re either buying for the project you want to do or for the project you haven’t thought of yet. But even if you have a big family who humors your obsession, eventually you’ve made all the scarves/hats/sweaters/fingerless gloves/mittens/lap blankets/full-sized blankets/stuffed animals/doilies/potholders etc that you’ll ever need or want. But you still have the urge to knot yarn into fabric. So what can you do?

My mother-in-law has made blankets for the NICU at a nearby hospital. You have to be in contact with the people who run it because there are strict requirements on the kinds of yarn you can use and what size the blankets can be, but that’s an option. She’s also made blankets for rescues in animal shelters. Same deal about requirements, but they tend to be a little looser.

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Me, I like to make hats. It’s a form that allows me to experiment if I want but fall back to a familiar pattern if I don’t. I especially find myself doing them if I want to avoid being sucked into my phone because I can’t doomscroll if I don’t have a free hand. But again, I only need so many of them.

Fortunately, we have a Little Free Library and a lot of foot traffic past our place, so in the not-winter, I make hats and scarves and in the winter, I put them in the LFL with a little note so the people who see them don’t think they belong to someone else.

I’d love to read your thoughts on art and craft and practice and creation, no matter what you work in. How do you share it? How long have you worked at it? How has your approach changed over time? I love that kind of thing.

Thanks as always for reading. Next post will be about poems, I promise.

When I was a kid watching tv and movies in the late 70’s and early 80’s, the world I lived in was violent but it somehow felt less immediately dangerous than it does now. Some of that is clearly because as an adult with a family, I’m way more attuned to potential danger than I was as a clueless 10 year old. But also it’s because the violence I encountered everyday mostly came from people I knew well, my parents, my classmates and teachers, the parents of my friends and other adults in my church. My parents were a combination of “spare the rod spoil the child” and “it takes a village” in the sense that if my sister or I misbehaved when under someone else’s care, the adults in charge had permission to smack us and then we’d get it again once we got home. This was not an uncommon parenting strategy at the time.

My parents were not physically abusive by the standards of the day. They felt spankings were necessary but they never sought to humiliate us publicly. We’d be taken to the bathroom or out to the car and then brought back when we’d finished crying. I don’t recall ever getting more than a little pay attention smack in the head where strangers could see it, but I saw parents hand out a lot worse to their kids in grocery store aisles and on sidewalks with no objection from other adults. Not long after I became a parent for the first time, I decided that wasn’t going to be in my toolbox.

Violence was also ever-present in school. The teachers often had paddles in their classrooms and if they didn’t, the principal had one in his office. More common were the fistfights, in the hallways or playgrounds or at the bus stop. I was never in a serious one, and the last one came when I was in junior high. I wasn’t a good fighter and did a lot to avoid confrontations, but I was competent enough—and physically large enough—to not be the easy target, even with my glasses and inhaler and unusual religious beliefs. I never wanted to fight but I was always prepared to if it came to that.

When I think about the tv shows I watched in the 80’s, fist fights played at least as large a part in the plots as car chases and guns and kissing did. Cops punched bad guys and got punched back. Private detectives punched bad guys and got punched back. And kids in school were taught to deal with bullies by standing up to them, even punching them, with the message that the bully would run away crying if confronted with a sock to the nose. Results varied on that one.

Fighting was also prevalent in professional sports, even the ones that weren’t contact sports. Bench-clearing brawls were common in baseball and basketball, football brawls were expected, and if you’ve ever heard the phrase “I went to the fights last night and a hockey game broke out,” well, I don’t need to say anything more about that.

And this is on top of the games themselves being more violent than they are today. Basketball fouls were harder and called less often, pitchers threw heaters at batters’ heads and batters charged the mound at a sprint so as to keep the catcher from getting in the way and holding them back. The announcers mostly found ways to justify the fighting, attributing it to competitiveness, to desire to win.

Then there were boxers, the men who punched each other in a ring, for money, with rules defining what was and what was not fair. Professional wrestling falls into this category as well, and I’m going to write about that at some point, but not now because it’s a different kind of entertainment.

It was a different media landscape back then, fewer outlets so attention was split in fewer directions, but even so boxing was way bigger then than MMA is now. It’s not close, really. Not for every weight class. The heavyweights and welterweights got the most attention, the former because they were giants and the latter because they had a stunning combination of power and speed. Big enough so that you could imagine feeling their punches through the TV screen, fast enough so you couldn’t imagine dodging them. I’ve pulled up some videos of Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvelous Marvin Hagler on YouTube recently and they’re still stunning.

What I didn’t feel I had to worry about was gun violence, and especially not the kind that gets the most attention these days. Gun control laws were still on the books and kinda sorta worked. And to be fair, living in the New Orleans suburbs I was pretty insulated from the drug war gun violence that was happening across the lake. Not everyone was that lucky. But my teachers never had to plan for what to do if someone wearing body armor showed up in the building with a semi-automatic rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a plan of attack. Those kinds of weapons were mostly in movies starring Arnold and Sly, Carl Weathers and Jesse “The Body” Ventura. They were cartoonish in the damage they caused, unrealistic even to a person who didn’t know anything about guns like me.

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Even the characters who worked in more traditional kinds of violence were over the top. Indiana Jones not only continued to punch Nazis with great vigor after being shot in the arm, he kept himself from dragging the ground beneath a transport truck. Axel Foley gets shot in his right arm and then, after escaping from the man who shot him, shoots the bad guy with his off hand.

But the area of culture most abstracted from the violence it portrayed was in science fiction. It’s easier to separate phasers and blasters and disruptors and whatever they called their guns in Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers from the kind of damage that bullets do. Should Princess Leia be hurt worse than she is in the beginning of Star Wars? How stunned is someone when Scotty shoots them on an away mission? How many people were killed on the Death Star when Luke blows it up?

I don’t watch a lot of TV or movies these days and much of what I do is dictated by my almost 11-year-old daughters. We watched Star Wars with them earlier this year on family movie night and they commented more than once on how violent it was, and it was funny to me because when I was their age and saw it (well after the original release—my parents didn’t let me see PG movies until I was 11), the violence seemed comparable to what I’d seen on TV already, just with a different kind of gun.

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I know there are still incredibly violent movies and TV shows out there, so maybe what’s happened is that the media landscape has become so diffused, so fractured that unlike when I was a kid watching what was available on three channels before the days of the VCR, my kids can watch a whole bunch of things that don’t make them uncomfortable, or that don’t desensitize them to violence and sex.

And it’s also likely that I’ve changed in what I want to consume as well. That’s especially true in sports. It’s one thing to get emotionally engaged with fictional violence. I can remind myself that it’s not real, that these are actors being paid to pretend. But I can’t do that with athletes, because it is real.

I was never more than a casual boxing fan, so it wasn’t even like I walked away from the sport. Other things just filled in the space I’d once had for it, especially once the pay-per-view era began. Football though? When the evidence for CTE started coming out, I reduced my engagement. I stopped watching games and only kept up with the Saints, who I’ve been fans of since I was 7 years old. I’ll watch highlights once in a while, but when I do and I see a big hit, my brain and my adrenal gland fight it out for control, because there’s the thrill of contact and the knowledge that the people on that screen may have shortened their lives a little bit, just to entertain me and millions of other people.

The poem I’m writing about is “Boxers in the Key of M” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, from her book Apocalyptic Swing. You can find the full text here in the archives of The New England Review.

I first met Gaby when I moved to San Francisco in 2003. Amy and I house sat for her and took care of her cat Clemente while we looked for a place to live, and then, some years later, we worked together running the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. I have always considered her both a wonderful person and an extraordinary writer and I recommend all her books unreservedly.

I’ve always found Gaby’s poems to be intimate, whether writing in the voice of a character or when the line between poet and I is more blurry, as it is in this poem. And it feels weird to write that when the poem starts with an announcement of its poem-ness, a sort of half-simile.

As in Marvelous and Macho, as in Leon’s

younger brother Michael, a name I learned

in Catholic school.

The connection of boxing to music is a natural one. Rounds are three minutes long, roughly the length of a pop song, and many legendary boxers have been described as dancing around the ring. Michael Spinks was apparently a dancer before he was a boxer, and his wife was a dance instructor. Camacho danced on Univision’s Mira Quien Baila after his boxing career ended. And while Marvelous Marvin Hagler didn’t have the same reputation for dancing as many other fighters, he still stayed on his toes and bounced.

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I also like where the mention of Catholic school takes us, along with the rest of that line and the next one, “St. Michael of the mat, / of the left hook and the deafening blow.” In multiple religious traditions, St. Michael is an archangel, a warrior in the battle between good and evil, but this is St. Michael of the mat. He’s the patron saint of earthier things, “of teeth glistening as they made their arc / to the laps of women sitting ringside.” That’s one of those images that falls into the sweet spot between glorious and gross, teeth wet with saliva and probably sweat and blood flying out of a mouth but in this arc that carries them beyond the bounds of the ring. The power it must take to hit a man so hard that his teeth not only come loose, but they fly, is awe-inspiring and terrifying.

And then here’s the first move toward the intimate.

You don’t like to see a man get knocked out

cold? Then you’ve never lived in Hartford

or any town of boarded windows. Have you

ever gotten hit or thrown against a wall?

There’s a sweetness to it, that moment when

your God would forgive you anything. One

punch free as yesterday’s papers. Marvelous

the way his body moved on the TV

screen.

Calvocoressi draws a connection between both being a witness to and recipient of physical violence and want, lack of resources, of opportunity perhaps. Put bluntly, the chances you’ll be personally touched by violence are higher in “any town of boarded windows” than they will be in less blighted areas.

But the speaker here won’t accept that as solely negative. It’s that feeling of having nothing left to lose, so you embrace what’s available, even if it’s pain. And to be thrown against a wall suggests that this is not a fight they have a chance of winning. They’re outmatched, not as big, not as strong, and yet that’s freeing, because if you’re going to stay in it even in those conditions, you’re going to get something out of the experience.

Take us home, Gaby.

And me? I moved around the room,

bobbed and weaved. I learned to hold my breath

so I could fight with my head held under water.

Before, the potential for violence was still a bit abstracted. There’s the possibility of being thrown against a wall, a maybe it’ll happen, but also maybe not. Maybe you can experience this vicariously.

But not now. This speaker has received some violence, and hasn’t been able to fully respond. There’s a threat they’re responding to using perhaps the only teacher they have access to, this guardian angel on the TV. They need to be ready to fight, so they practice, they train, they prepare for the worst.

And what happens next? Was there a fight? Did they escape without having to put that training to use? We can’t know. That’s not in the universe of this poem. We only know they made it long enough to tell us about this dance, this music.

Thanks as always for reading this far. I’d love to hear your thoughts on anything related to this. I know violence is often hard to talk about. It is for me at least. But if you’re willing, I am. Even if not, thanks for your time here.

Sorry, I’m not trying to be cryptic here. About a month ago, I guess, I changed my bio on the few places online where I post. I added a “Ret.” to “Senior Poetry Editor at The Rumpus.” I considered changing it “Emeritus” but that’s too academic both for The Rumpus and for me. Retired is the appropriate term.

I was with The Rumpus almost from the beginning. It was December 2008 and Amy and I were back in San Francisco for the first time since we’d moved away 3 years before. Amy had an interview at MLA and I met up from some old friends from my time as a Stegner and they told me I should meet a bunch of them later at a bar in the Mission to talk about this online magazine Stephen Elliott was starting because they were looking for someone to write about poetry occasionally.

I’d blogged about politics for Stephen’s personal website in the run up to the 2004 election, and had read with him at the Stanford Bookstore, which was also the first and only time I ever appeared on BookTV. So I showed up. I mostly talked to Andrew Altschul about it that night, as I recall, though most of the time I was there I caught up with other friends. I got an email a couple of days later asking if I would write a weekly links column for the blog, I said yes, and I got an email address and a login/password to the site.

We went live for real on January 20, 2009. Kind of a slow news day as I recall, though there was a bit of controversy on the internet about a poem by Elizabeth Alexander read during a ceremony that morning, a controversy that required (not really) a response from the new poetry columnist at this website that had just gone live. 

So that was the first thing I wrote for The Rumpus. Not a column of links, though many of those would follow. Nope, I wrote a response to the reaction to Elizabeth Alexander’s poem for Barack Obama’s inauguration, “Praise Song for the Day.” (I didn’t even have to look that up.) I dug up the poem Robert Frost actually wrote for JFK’s inauguration (which is just goddamn terrible) as opposed to The Gift Outright, which he recited when the wind blew his papers all over the place. I looked back at the offerings from Maya Angelou and Miller Williams (who was one of my professors at Arkansas where I did my MFA) and came to the rousing conclusion that, as inaugural poems go, Alexander’s was pretty good, given the competition, and was certainly poetry no matter what some Impressive Critics had claimed.

It was published as the top story on the site for a little while. Maybe a day? Nothing stayed at the top for long in those days. And I have no idea how many people read it. But a day or two after that, I got an email from Stephen asking me if I wanted to be poetry editor instead of just a columnist. I’d be responsible for soliciting and editing book reviews and occasional essays and I’d still have my column and no we wouldn’t be publishing poetry yet but keep it in mind.

I almost said no. Seriously, I was torn about this. I’d never edited anything before, I’d never written a book review, much less solicited one. I had no idea how I’d even get books to reviewers. I’d never even heard of an ARC. So I mentioned it to Amy and she was like “Of course you have to do it are you nuts?” 

So I did.

I learned on the job. I put out calls on this newish thing called social media for reviewers and learned that most presses would gladly send you or your reviewers copies of books, ARCs or finished copies or both just in hopes of getting some coverage. I learned how to format stuff on Wordpress. I read lots of other literary blogs and occasionally argued with people in the comment sections. I also learned that comment sections are both poisonous and overrated and sometimes it’s not worth the increase in traffic to have them.

We added things along the way. We started a National Poetry Month Poem-A-Day program and we published so much great poetry from amazing writers who trusted us with it. We started the essay series that is kind of the inspiration for this place, “The Last Book I Loved,” which spawned “The Last Poem I Loved.”

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And we started The Rumpus Poetry Book Club. If I have any kind of legacy, I hope it’s for that. 

The book club started with three of us, Camille Dungy, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and me. We would take turns choosing a book, writing a short essay about why we’d chosen it, and then lead both the online discussion with members and the interview with the author at the end of the month. Camille chose the first one, Shane Book’s Ceiling of Sticks. Gaby chose Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation the following month and I chose, serendipitously enough, Elizabeth Alexander’s Crave Radiance Selected Poems 1990-2010. 

We worked that way for a few years, but other responsibilities drew Camille and Gaby away and eventually it was just me. Often I chose the books, but when the site was sold first to Marisa Siegel and then again to Alyson Sinclair, I had less input on what books we selected. But that was fine, and here’s why.

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From the moment I took the job as poetry editor, I was concerned that I would let my taste in poems and poets dominate the coverage, and I knew that my experience was narrow. My MFA was from Arkansas, a school known for formalism and New Criticism, and until Davis McCombs joined the faculty in my last year, our reading lists were not filled with contemporaries. I’d gotten a taste of how much I didn’t know during my time at Stanford, but even then I didn’t really understand just how much the internet had allowed for an explosion of experimentation and cross-cultural communication in poetry. 

I knew that I didn’t want the poetry section to just be stuff I liked, that I wanted us to provide space for voices that were wildly different from my own in style and experience. I wanted to read poems and books that didn’t assume my demographic was the primary audience. But also, I didn’t really trust myself to not slip into just reading what was comfortable for me, so when Marisa and Alyson took over the book selection, that meant my primary job was finding ways to talk with the authors about things that might make me uncomfortable. 

But that’s the gig, as I see it. When I first started as poetry editor, some people online said things like “I want difficult poems that make me work to understand them,” and I agreed, but it turned out they had a specific definition of difficult meant, and it didn’t always include multi-lingual work or poems about sexual assault or racism or queerness or disability or other subjects that can make a reader like me feel uncomfortable. And I like to think I mostly did okay with it. 

The Poetry Book Club ended earlier this year. The final book we talked about was Kenzie Allen’s Cloud Missives, a book I heartily recommend. We ended with 14 years, 2 months worth of books, which is 160 books if I did the math right. (Edit: I didn’t do the math right. It’s 170 books.) I’ve talked to so many brilliant writers over the years, met more than a few at AWP and elsewhere, sipped drinks and shook hands and hugged their necks when they let me. I’ll always feel like I got away with something, given how much I took from the experience.

I want to thank some people I was lucky to work with during my time there, and this isn’t everyone by a long shot but: Isaac Fitzgerald, Roxane Gay, Cheryl Strayed, Camille Dungy and Gabrielle Calvocoressi all made my life so much richer just by letting me get to know them a bit. Cortney Lamar Charleston and Carolina Ebeid were the ones who expanded Rumpus Original Poetry into what I had always hoped it could become and I’m so proud to have been associated with their work. Molly Spencer was one of my first co-editors and helped me realize that it was okay to offload some of the work I was trying to do. Marisa Siegel kept The Rumpus alive when it easily could have died.

And finally, Alyson Sinclair, who has fought to get The Rumpus on a more stable financial footing while refusing to compromise on the quality of the work they publish. Alyson and some of the other Rumpus folk are still trying to recover from Hurricane Helene, as I mentioned in an earlier post, so if you can lend a hand, it’ll mean the world to me. Here’s information on where you can do that.

I’ll always feel like a part of The Rumpus, even if I don’t have an email address there anymore, and not just when I’m drinking coffee from my multiple Write Like a Motherfucker mugs. 

Thanks as always for reading. If you’re someone who’s been touched by The Rumpus over the years, I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

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So instead, I’ll briefly tell you about why I chose to vote for Kamala Harris for President a couple of weeks ago and then get into a poem or two.

The first time I voted for President was 1996, and I voted for Harry Browne, the Libertarian. I had just left the church I’d grown up in, a church that forbade voting in elections because they believed that the kingdom mentioned in the Lord’s Prayer was literal and that we owed our allegiance to it, and not to any earthly rule. We owed the earthly government our obedience to its laws so long as they didn’t conflict with God’s laws, but no more than that. And so maybe it’s understandable why, my first time out of the gate, I went for the candidate that asked for the least amount of government to give allegiance to.

But every time I’ve voted since then, it’s been for the Democratic candidate up and down the ticket, except for one time in San Francisco when I voted Green Party for Mayor. I vote for the team more than the person, in the general election at least.

Which is why I voted for Joe Biden in 2020. He was the captain of the team. Nothing about him excited me, and I had some grudges against him from his time as Senator, more for his bankruptcy bill than for his crime bill though mostly connected to his support for the Iraq War. I was an Elizabeth Warren supporter in the primaries. But the party wanted Biden and I voted for him and he won and he turned out to be a way better president on a lot of things than I ever would have imagined. He disappointed as well, the way all presidents do, but more good than bad in very tricky times, I’d say.

I’ll be blunt here. I didn’t like the way Biden was pressured out of the race by some powerful forces in the news media. I thought a lot of their criticisms of how they perceived his mental state were overblown and that they were basically trying to prove themselves still relevant in an ever-changing media landscape.

Anyway, enough of that. It would be easy at this point to say I voted for Harris because she’s now the leader of the team. And that’s part of it. But her being the leader of the team isn’t what got me to the polling place on the third day of early voting, and it’s not why we had an unofficial yard sign up within days of Biden withdrawing, and it’s not why I am now the owner and regular wearer of the only piece of camo gear I’ve ever owned despite having lived many years in rural and small-town Louisiana.

I voted for Harris because she’s done a good job as VP, even though there’s not a lot of stuff for the VP to do. I voted for Harris because she comes into her interactions with others seeking conversation and connection, not confrontation. She rarely falls into what my wife Amy calls “the language of grievance,” which is what makes so much of online discourse so poisonous.

Harris has taken a lot of criticism in certain online areas for the support she’s received from conservatives like Liz and Dick Cheney, especially for campaigning alongside the former, but that willingness to engage on the topics that they can agree on is important to me. There’s no indication that Liz Cheney will be making policy in a Harris administration, nor that Harris has had to compromise on something important to get Cheney’s support.

But also, there’s the way my daughters light up when we mention the possibility of the US finally having a woman president, and the potential that they’ll have full choice over their bodies by the time they’re grown (though it will take much more than just this election to get that moving again).

I haven’t talked any about her opposition, and that’s deliberate. I don’t need to set Harris up in contrast to him to make her worth voting for. She’s a good candidate, qualified and experienced and with solid policy plans. That’s the reason to vote for her.

When I pulled my copy of Kendra DeColo’s book I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World from the shelf, I had every intention of writing about the poem “I Would Like to Tell the President to Eat a Dick in a Non-Homophobic Way,” but I changed my mind on it because, as with the piece above, I didn’t want to spend any time talking about him, even in the hilarious way DeColo does in that poem. Seriously, go read it if you haven’t before or even if it’s been a while.

Instead, I offer you “I Hope Hillary is Having Good Sex,” which appeared in The Account Magazine.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, a lot of the talk online among Clinton supporters was about her sense of humor, about her laugh, about how she wasn’t the caricature of the humorless feminist that the right-wing had painted her as since at least 1988 when her husband ran for President. They were right, of course. Hillary Clinton is funny, and very human, and if this country elected its President like most other countries with presidents do, she’d have been president for at least 4 and possibly 8 years and we’d be in a whole different world right now.

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But I don’t ever remember anyone, in all the years she was in the spotlight, ever really talking about her or with her in sexual terms, except perhaps as the long-suffering wife of a cheating husband. People commented on her appearance, on her haircuts and pantsuits, but the idea that she might be a person who enjoys sex was never there. I feel like the combination of Clinton and sex only appeared in the caricatures of the Limbaugh’s of the world who said she could not possibly be interested in sex because she was a feminist and feminists hate sex.

Kendra DeColo throws all that out the window and into the faces of anyone who assumes Clinton could not possibly be a sexual being, but I appreciate the way she moves there at the start of the poem.

I hope Hillary is having good sex

I say to myself at the farmers’ market

While fingering the over-ripened bustier

Of an heirloom tomato

So close to rot it nearly sucks

My pinky into its dappled maw

The image of fingering a bustier and the sucking a pinky in the opening lines makes it clear that DeColo isn’t going to half-ass the raunchy potential of this poem. That this happens at the farmers’ market as opposed to a grocery store feels to me like she’s playing up the boho-chic, crocheted hobo bag carrying stereotypes of liberal women, but that’s probably a stretch. That the tomato is over-ripe and close to rot can be read as a symbol of how overdue the country is for a woman to be president, but at this point I’m starting to feel like I’m in grad school again and I’m going to move on before I start musing about the importance of it being an heirloom tomato as opposed to, I don’t know, a beefsteak or Roma.

I hope at least she’s getting decent head I say again

Now that she’s proven a woman

Can win the popular vote

And still lose to an imbecile

And I, never having considered this part of Hillary Clinton’s existence before, nod and think to myself “she deserves that much at least, after all the shit she’s dealt with over the last 30-40 years however long it’s been.”

But now we hit the first turn in the poem. DeColo gives us a list of reasons why this happened and it’s interesting the way she presents it.

Because sexism

Because Russian interference

Because my grandmother

Who worked for LBJ and then

Nixon and was harassed by male coworkers

Until she had to quit

Even she said of Hillary, “There is something

About that woman I just don’t trust.”

Oof. There’s so many ways DeColo could have turned this moment into a righteous rant about all the structural inequities that Clinton and other women politicians have faced, could have written a book’s worth of reasons and not run out of them and they would have all been true and we could have all nodded sagely along with them and it would not nearly have had the same effect as that story does in six lines. It’s powerful because all of us know someone who, for reasons we don’t understand, hold beliefs that are in direct contradiction to their own experiences. We probably do that too, on something. So the poem makes us sit with that, with that uneasiness around someone we love having done something that hurts us.

Having put us in that moment, DeColo shifts back to the primary subject of the poem.

I hope Hillary is getting it in

By Bill or someone better at listening

Who asks her what she needs

Then gets directly down to business

Without preamble or pussyfooting

Someone who emerges

Only for a sandwich or a breath of fresh air

So, great use of pussyfooting, almost certainly the best use of pussyfooting ever in a poem. Also, I like that she starts with Bill here but then immediately tosses him aside in favor of someone better at listening and who is interested in what she needs. And while (am I really going to do this? I guess so) I read “getting it in” at the start of this run of lines as referencing penetrative sex, I read getting down to business combined with emerges only for a sandwich or a breath of fresh air as more like oral. The important part is that Hillary here is able to get what she wants and needs in the manner she desires it from someone who is attentive and ready to get after it.

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Do I seem uncomfortable here? This is what I get for choosing this poem to write about. Let’s move on.

I hope she has multiple sidepieces

Each a different build and scent

And when they ask

To see her closet full of immaculate suits

Organized and shimmering on their racks

Like a god’s molted skin

She lets them touch just the hem

Yeah. I’d say Hillary Clinton deserves all that if she wants it. But what I like best about how this poem closes is the way DeColo plays off the way Clinton has been talked and written about for decades now. The media on the whole but especially the talking heads and pundits and especially the right-wing assholes who built careers off of bashing her have consistently treated her as not human. She’s a machine, she’s a devil or demon, she’s a monster, but never human.

And it’s like DeColo says in this moment, okay, I’ll play that game, except no, she’s a god with worshippers who want to just bask in her presence and receive the tiniest part of her glory. The suits as the thing that protects mere mortals from burning up should they see her in her true glory is a great image, and I’m sure some readers are uncomfortable with the allusion in the last line to the woman in Matthew chapter 9 who was healed by touching Jesus’s garment, but hey, we all have our kinks.

Thanks as always for reading. Please, if you haven’t voted yet and you’re able, go do so. And if you can help someone else vote, do that too. And then look out for each other as the votes come in and the noise gets loud. We’re constantly bombarded with reasons to be angry and combative. We have to look for the moments to be kind, sometimes, but they’re worth holding on to.

Almost everyone I’ve met and gotten to know in the literary world in the last 15 years I met because of The Rumpus. I started there when blogs were still the dominant form of online discourse about poetry—my initial gig was to write a weekly roundup column of what was happening in the posts and comment sections—and that quickly progressed into writing and editing book reviews and then to curating the National Poetry Month series and running the poetry book club. Back when I went to AWP, my name tag always had The Rumpus in the organization spot instead of the university where I taught. It’s been the biggest part of my professional identity for almost as long as I’ve had one.

The Rumpus has had some financial ups and downs over the years, with the ups never really being that far up. It’s always been tight financially because there’s no institutional support and no big donor behind the scenes. The people who make it happen do it because they love the site and the work and want it to continue to exist.

And while money is always a problem for any independent media outlet, it’s especially one for The Rumpus right now because the people who do the most work for it are still digging out from Hurricane Helene. The Rumpus is headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina. I’m going to let Alyson tell you more about that part of things.

I don’t usually do this kind of thing in my newsletters, but this situation calls for an exception. Please forward this message to people you know who might be willing to help, and if you can afford it, please either become a supporting member of The Rumpus or make a donation to help the site recover and keep going into the future. Links for those options are in the post below, reprinted from The Rumpus Newsletter with permission.

Thanks.

[Publisher's note: Asheville, NC]

Dear Readers,

We're slowly moving from crisis to recovery mode here in Asheville, NC. Despite facing the largest natural disaster this area has experienced in at least 100 years, The Rumpus once again published original work 5 days this week. This is thanks to our wonderful volunteer team who are based in Asheville and all over the US.

Some folks are beginning to see water come from their taps. It's not safe to drink yet, but the promise of a hot shower soon is incredible after 21 days of nothing. 1800+ water pipes were decimated in our area because of Hurricane Helene, which dumped over 30 inches of water on Western NC and caused overwhelming flooding.

This week I spent 3 hours at a FEMA center and heard a depressing stat that 40% of independent businesses do NOT survive natural disasters like the one we experienced here. I also talked with the Small Business Association, which (as reported by The NY Times and others yesterday) is currently out of funds.

I'm seeing so much need here that I'm trying to volunteer regularly to help my community, while also trying to figure out how to deal with my own personal financial loss and how that will affect The Rumpus's future. I work two other jobs to subsidize the magazine and have yet to pay myself in the past 3 years for the 30+ hours/week I work on the magazine. Things were getting better—we redesigned the website last year; we raised funds for better contributor pay this year; we're slowly growing our Membership base; and we became fiscally sponsored so we could begin receiving tax-deductible donations. However, this crisis is not something anyone planned for and has created a jarring setback.

Wednesday, I showed up to help remove hundreds (thousands?!) of buckets of mud and debris from a once beautiful artist collective space in downtown Marshall, NC. The organizers reminded us that this effort is a relay, not a sprint. We need to be able to hand off things that we can no longer carry. We need to be able to rely on others to help us move forward when we're overwhelmed and have to take a break.

So here I am (again) asking if you'll help us during a time where it feels impossible to be thoughtful about the future. Can you donate? Can you become a Member? Can you write a note (or forward this one) to someone who might be able to help? Do you know a lit organization who can't donate, but who might want to run ads with us? There's currently a ~$22,000 gap between the funds the magazine has now and the amount we need to raise by Dec. 31.

I need to pass the baton for a minute to help us get past this stage and (hopefully) onto the next.

With appreciation,
Alyson Sinclair, Publisher/Owner, The Rumpus

DONATE to help The Rumpus recover & continue

[pictured above: Alyson Sinclair, Publisher on volunteer clean up duty for an artist collective space in NC]

Personally, I’ve never run from a storm. That’s not meant as a brag. Most of the 36 total years I lived in hurricane country I never needed to run. When I was a kid, hurricane days off school were more likely to be beautiful than stormy. It seemed like the storms always turned east and hit Biloxi or Mobile or Gulf Shores. But also, the storms just didn’t feel as dangerous. The ones the adults all talked about in hushed whispers, Camille, Betsy, they were the outliers. There was one storm, Elena I believe, where my parents took us in the middle of the night from our trailer to the house of some friends from the congregation across town, but the next morning we went home, and apart from some water in the streets, nothing seemed amiss.

The only scary hurricane I’ve never ridden out was Wilma. This was the same year as Katrina, which in Fort Lauderdale came through as a category one that did plenty but was a baby compared to what it became. Wilma was a fading category two when it hit us, but the eye was 70 miles wide and the storm bands pretty much covered the state. We lived in an old Florida apartment, low to the ground, walls made of cinder blocks and rebar, with hurricane shutters and strong doors. We thought about leaving, but where would we go? With regular traffic, it’s a ten hour drive to Georgia and we didn’t know anyone there we could have stayed with. We didn’t have the money for an extended hotel stay, not for three humans and two cats at gale force wind prices.

We hunkered down, got supplies, put blankets on the floor of the most secure interior closet we had in case we actually were going to try to sleep. The rains came and the winds picked up. Every once in a while I’d ease the door open to see what it was like outside. The wind bowed the palm trees and I thought about Victor Hernandez Cruz’s poem “Problems With Hurricanes” and the lines “How would your family / feel if they had to tell / The generations that you / got killed by a flying / Banana.” I shut the door. I thought about the one person killed during Hurricane Charley, a guy who stepped outside while in the calming eye of the storm to have a smoke only to have a tree fall on him. The winds calmed and I looked out. The table on our porch had come over the fence and wedged itself between my car and Amy’s truck. The winds picked up, blew directly at us, and then the water was coming in under the door, and we were mopping it up with towels and trying to push it back.

We did this in dim light. The electricity had been out for hours and the hurricane shutters kept out whatever light was available outside. I don’t remember being afraid, really, in the moment. I had confidence the house would hold—it had been built in the 1950’s and what it lacked in glamor it made up for in solidity. But the roof could have come off or a tree could have been hurled through the wall. After the storm passed, when we walked though the neighborhood, we saw a row of parked cars all with the windows smashed out and coconut sized dents in the fenders. In the park, an old fighter jet on a pedestal was now nose-first in the ground. We came out of it fine. We were lucky.

I thought about all of this when I was trying to come up with something to write for that filmmaking workshop, something that could maybe help people who’d never faced it understand why people might stay in the face of such a storm, why maybe they wouldn’t have a choice. But more than that, I wanted to think about what to take with you when you leave a place with the thought that it might be a while before you come back. That you might never come back except to visit. That you might never come back at all.

Like I said, I’ve never run from a storm. Never had to. But there have been plenty of times in my life when I couldn’t run when a storm was coming, where I felt blessed that the storm turned, guilty as I felt about that for the people it hit. There but for the grace, you know?

I know a little something about leaving a place, though, so I tried to lean into that. I know about making choices on what I can take and what has to stay behind. I don’t know what it’s like to move to a place where I don’t have something waiting. That’s fucking terrifying to me, the idea of just showing up with what I could carry and thinking “guess I’m here now.” I’ve got pretty much every advantage I could want in this society and that idea just knocks me to my knees. Think about that when you see posters online or talking heads on TV blithely suggest that people should just move out of danger areas. Look at the way one of our major political parties is demonizing people who relocate from dangerous spots and then imagine you have to do it.

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What I wrote first for this film project was kind of a poem. I imagined speak/singing it maybe over video of hurricanes, satellite images, storm surge, destruction. I haven’t touched it much since that initial burst of writing. I didn’t think I would share it with anyone so it’s still pretty uncooked. But I want to think about it some more, given this latest storm and the folks trying to dig out of it, find their people, figure out what they have left to rebuild a life from either where they are now or where they’re from.

So You Want to Run From a Storm: A Checklist

Must Have:

People you can drive to with a floor you can sleep on

Or

A credit card with room on it and a hotel with space (there won’t be any hotel rooms)

A car that’ll get you there and back

Next month’s rent

The first book you ever bought with your own money

A boss who don’t expect you to open up for him because he flew with his family to Atlanta just in case the storm don’t turn and he’s depending on you

Gas money

Three days of clothes

The smell of buttermilk biscuits right out of the oven

All the water left in the store, even Dasani (there’s no water left in the store)

Jumper cables and a can of fix-a-flat

Toilet paper

Mom’s old road atlas for when the phone dies

Chargers for if there’s power wherever you wind up and an outlet no one will bust your ass over

Every recipe you ever learned

Every battery you can steal

Copies of your résumé—you might be there a while

Your best pillows

A gun if you got one but don’t tell no one else in the car about it

All the ice left in the store (there’s no ice left in the store)

Your good crochet hooks and all the yarn you can stuff in a bag

Headphones

The voices of your neighbors cussing each other in the front yard

A small bag of crushed oyster shell from the driveway, to guide you back home

A flatboat to get you the last mile

Thank you as always for reading. Tell me, what goes on your list? What do you take with you?

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P.S. About the film. It came out okay. I haven’t been able to get a copy of it from my partner. He keeps putting me off, which is fine honestly. The important thing was the experience. I’ve since downloaded the program he used to put it together, DaVinci Resolve. I haven’t played with it yet, but the app button looks at me insistently, so maybe.

My father died while I was in the sky between Seattle and Denver. I was returning from AWP, changing planes, and I knew the moment I saw I had a message waiting what it would say.

Four days prior I’d gotten a call from my sister. The doctor said my dad had 3-4 days left at most, and she wanted me to know, felt like I should say goodbye to him even though we hadn’t talked in years. She was right.

Still, I didn’t call until I was changing planes in Denver on my trip out. Part of it was that life had just been that hectic. Our twins were three weeks old and I was trying to get my mother-in-law up to speed on taking care of them and Amy. She was patient with me, which I have always appreciated. Maybe part of it was that I wanted to have this conversation in a place where it felt impossible for anyone who knew me to overhear or see my reaction if it didn’t go well. It’s always easy to disappear in a crowd of people who are all trying to get somewhere else and are either hurrying or waiting to do it.

The call went as well as any phone call can go when one person is in late-stage dementia and the other doesn’t know what to say. We talked for about ten minutes and had the same conversation three times. I tell myself he knew who I was.

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By the time my dad died we hadn’t had a real relationship in about 18 years. I was officially kicked out of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in January 1998, though I’d stopped identifying as one in mid-1995, and that meant since I wasn’t part of the congregation, I couldn’t be part of the family anymore either. When we communicated, there had to be some specific reason—a question about insurance, news about extended family. And of course the semi-regular attempt to get me to become a Witness again, which would allow for normalizing the family part again. But no shooting the shit, no talking about football or retelling stories from childhood or catching up over a dish my mom called Mexican lasagna, flour tortillas with layers of meat and cheese and veggies between them stacked in a Crock Pot and set on low for 10 hours.

During those 18 years, my dad lost more and more of his ability to process and access his memories. He never lost his ability to do things, from what I understand. He could balance a checkbook; he just couldn’t remember that he’d done it already. One time he recognized a neighborhood near one of the many elementary schools he attended as a child even though he hadn’t been there in decades, and walked my mom and some friends through winding streets to show them the old school, still standing and in use. He could talk you though the strings of scripture to prove some doctrinal point just as he had when he was an elder in the congregation. And then he’d do it again.

He didn’t forget that I wasn’t a Witness.

When he died there was no way I could get to the funeral in person. It was in San Antonio, I’d just gotten home from a trip, my mother-in-law couldn’t stay. It was impossible. But the local congregation had set up a system years before for my dad where he could phone in and listen to the meetings when he was too frail to be there in person, and so that’s how I went. I sat in my house with my phone on speaker and listened to an elder I didn’t know talk about a hope for resurrection I didn’t believe in.

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No one from the family talked. That’s not how Witness funerals work, not in my experience. I’d like to say that I remember every word but I can’t. I remember feeling the distance; the miles between Des Moines, Iowa and Boerne, Texas might as well have been measured in parsecs, in the silence of space.

Not long after the funeral, I got another call from my sister, this time asking if I wanted some of my dad’s ashes. Most would go to the mausoleum in San Antonio, but if we wished, we could get each some put in a tiny urn to have with us.

I said yes. I said it because I don’t know how I could have said no in that moment. It’s not like I hated my father. The divide between us wasn’t because he’d beaten me for years or abused me. And even though the net effect of he and my mom saying that their adherence to doctrine was more important to them than our relationship was that I felt unworthy of affection, I don’t think that was their intent. (Yes, I have talked to my therapist about all this for years.) The whole time we weren’t talking, I wanted us to be talking, just not about the one thing he was willing to talk about.

But I wanted some part of him. No, it’s more true to say that I didn’t want to regret not having part of him close to me, because this was a one-time deal. There was no “we can pull the urn out for a quarter-teaspoon for you later on.” And I honestly didn’t know when or if I would ever get to San Antonio to visit the mausoleum in person. I wanted a part of him to say goodbye to.

Except now I’ve got this urn. It’s silver, tiny, fits in the palm of my hand. It’s heavier than I expect, though I have no idea what to expect. It comes in a box, (its own coffin?) wrapped in navy blue velvet, a simple silver latch on the front of it. And now I’ve got to do something with it because as long as I have it, I can’t fully say goodbye.

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They don’t warn you about this when they ask you if you want the urn, that you’re going to have to make decisions about it. Where are you going to put it? How often do you want to be reminded of your father’s death? What’s an appropriate level of respect?

So many of the story possibilities around this situation spring from the idea that my dad, in the afterlife, is watching me trying to make these decisions and having various emotional reactions. I bet some clever writers could throw together a whole web video series around this concept. Maybe even a podcast. The ghost dad who haunts his kids because of where they’ve put his secondary urns and so on.

But my dad didn’t believe in an afterlife. The Witnesses believe death is the end of consciousness until God resurrects the faithful after Armageddon, so there’s no haunting, but also no smiling down from heaven beatifically. He’s not there to judge me for my choices. I get to do it for him.

Currently my share of my dad’s ashes sits on a shelf in my office beside other urns, the remains of the cats Amy and I have loved and said goodbye to in the nearly quarter-century we’ve been together. I hung the shelf recently for just that purpose. Before that they were all on top of a bookshelf behind my desk, out of sight. They all deserved better.

I came across the poem I’m writing about today last month, as part of my job as the host of The Rumpus Poetry Book Club, a job that’s about to end soon. That’ll be its own post. It’s by Nancy Miller Gomez from her book Inconsolable Objects, recently published by YesYes Books. It’s titled “We All Fall Down,” which immediately invokes the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie” (which I just learned is NOT about the plague—huh) and begins this way:

Ashes coated my son’s cheeks,

his lashes, his hands still gripping

the pressure-sealed bag

that exploded when he opened it.

And let me tell you the words “oh no” came out of my mouth the first time I read that passage. I really like the way the title and “ashes” as the first word hints at the age of the child here, someone small and curious who just needs to know and has no concept of what they’re doing or what could possibly happen. Gomez keeps us in that moment with the next lines:

I just wanted to see, he said.

I wiped soot off his eyebrows,

rubbed a smudge off his lip.

It came out everywhere, he said,

and we both began to laugh,

gasps that grew into a keening

and filled the room.

I think in the abstract, the idea of being there when someone opens up the bag of ash inside an urn and it explodes all over them is one of those scarring-for-life moments. Just as a witness to it, as the person who has to help clean it up or soothe the person covered in cremains. I can’t even fathom what it would be like to be the kid here, but what saves the moment from spinning into horror is that the kid is so innocent, unaware on some level of what’s just happened, that it allows room for the humor of the moment to take over. There’s this cathartic release of energy that starts as laughter and moves to keening, lamentation. But never to sadness.

Then we were silent.

I helped my son sweep his dad

off the chairs, the stairs, emptied

the inside of his shoes and collar,

but the gritty gray bits

of bone and ash wouldn’t fit

back inside the plastic urn.

I really like the tone here, the matter-of-factness of it. The reader needs to breathe after the explosion/realization, but also there’s a sense that after this terrible moment, we still have to get on with life, and that means cleaning up the ash and trying to put it back.

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In our home, I’m the designated handler of gross things—poop, vomit, carcasses of mice that have somehow wandered into a house filled with animals that delight in torturing and killing them—and so I saw myself in this moment caught between needing to comfort my child and clean them up but also somehow show respect to the remains of my loved one, though what I’m really trying to respect is the symbol of them, the concrete reminder of who they were to me. They’re not materially harmed in any way because they’re not in the ash, not in my belief system anyway, but I still feel like I owe it to their memory because I agreed to be responsible for this part of who they were.

The poem doesn’t go that route, however, and I found it freeing.

Could it be, even after death,

love expands? We scooped up

what was left and dropped it

from the balcony

like snow.

The speaker has to confront the question, what do you do in this situation no one could have prepared you for? What do you do with the ash that doesn’t fit back in the container? With this part of a person who was once an integral part of your life and who lives on in your memory? I can imagine a scenario where the speaker looks for solutions, for a machine or company that will reseal the remains back into a bag small enough to fit back inside the urn, or where they put together a temporary fix until they can get a final resting place for the urn or a symbolic spot for the ashes to be scattered.

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But in the end, she puts back what will fit and then with her kid, they scatter what was left from the balcony, a sort of goodbye ceremony. They keep what they can and say goodbye to the rest which feels like an apt metaphor for relationships.

Thanks as always for reading this far. I’d love to read your stories like this, either in the comments or if you have your own Substack/website, over there. Drop links in the comments if you like. Take care.

Vachon, John, photographer. Reciting "I pledge allegiance," etc., public school. Norfolk, Virginia. United States Norfolk Virginia, 1941. Mar. Photograph.

The Witnesses claimed to be neutral in the workings of secular governments. We didn’t vote, didn’t run for office; didn’t support candidates or belong to political parties, didn’t celebrate nationalistic holidays or sing patriotic songs. DIdn’t join the military, sought religious exemptions when drafted and if those were refused, went to prison rather than join.

The theory was that since Jesus had said “my kingdom is no part of this world” that his followers should swear allegiance only to that kingdom and no other. It was another way of showing the world that we were different from those other, corrupted churches who mixed religious and secular power. The dogma was that Witnesses obeyed laws that did not directly conflict with God’s law (as interpreted by them), following the direction of the Apostle Paul in Romans 13 to be subject to the superior authorities. We also leaned heavily on Jesus’s words about leaving Caesar’s things to Caesar and God’s things to God.” If it sounds like this is one of the few things I still believe in from my Witness days, that’s because it is. I think if you truly consider yourself a citizen of God’s Kingdom, the one mentioned in the Lord’s Prayer, then you should separate yourself from secular authority. But that’s a theological argument.

But I had other reasons for wanting a big wall between church and state. And for those, we have to go back to the 80’s, which is appropriate since so much of what we’re seeing now in contemporary politics gets its first real taste of power then.

Y’all know Jimmy Carter is an evangelical Christian, right? Southern Baptist even, though he publicly distanced himself from some of their tenets in 2000 and given their continued movement to the conservative right I can’t imagine he’s changed his mind any. Thing is, when he ran for and won the presidency in 1976, being an evangelical didn’t exactly help him. And it really didn’t help him when he ran for re-election against Ronald Wilson Reagan in 1980 because that’s when evangelicals decided they were going to take an active part in Republican politics. This is where you get things like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and when abortion becomes a top-level issue, replacing opposition to school integration.

An aside: has there even been a former president who has tried as hard as Jimmy Carter to get right with God for what he did both to become President and as President? He has lived the last 44 years like he knows Hell is right there. More loudly-Christian politicians could take some advice from that, honestly.

Okay, so there was a huge vibe shift in the way religion and politics became mixed in the 80’s. Reagan himself wasn’t loudly Christian, but he gave voice to people who were. More than any other elected official, I think Reagan successfully pushed the idea that conservative Christians were the only real Americans, and that anyone else was both an enemy of faith and of the country. And his political descendants have run with it. Reagan didn’t invent Christian Nationalism, but he sure gave it a push toward respectability.

The place I saw all this happen was in school, and I want to be clear that it’s not like my schools were bastions of secular humanism before Reagan came along. This was Louisiana, after all. The school bus that took me home stopped at the local Catholic school on the way to drop off kids who were going to Catechism. Every school year started with a prepared conversation with my teachers about how I wouldn’t be saying the pledge or participating in any holiday activities like exchanging Valentines or dressing up for Halloween or singing Christmas carols in music class. (We did sing “You Light Up My Life” for a school assembly once in 4th grade and I think I deserve compensation for that.) The fact that school holidays are much more secular now is a good thing.

But then there was Civics class. I want to say 10th grade. One semester on government and citizenship and the evils of communism and how lucky we were that Reagan was president now because he was strong and so was the Pope and that’s what’s got the Russians on the run and if that sounds bonkers let me tell you that I am underselling it a little. I don’t know what the expected curriculum for the class was but I’m pretty sure it didn’t include McCarthy era Red Scare booklets on communism that were crumbling with age. She’d rescued them from a closet, she said, and so we couldn’t take them home but she felt it was important for us to know the enemy and so we read them in class, not as history to be learned but as important knowledge for RIGHT NOW.

She also spent a lot of time railing about taxes and welfare queens and also suggested that maybe emancipation wasn’t as good for black people as it was made out to be since slave owners often treated them like family fed and clothed them and plus they were valuable so who would damage their own property even though they were more like family and once the war was over you know a lot of them liked their lives so much they stayed on the plantation because it was all they knew only now they had to feed and clothe themselves and for a lot of them it was harder and honestly I’m leaving out the punctuation here so I can finish typing this shit faster.

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And look, I’m not going to pretend like I was some super-knowledgeable teenager in this class, refuting her claims as quickly as she made them. I swallowed more of them than I care to admit, even though my congregation was more than half Black and I had seen firsthand how they were treated differently than I was when we were out knocking on doors or in convenience stores getting a coke.

My Civics teacher didn’t get much into how laws were made or checks and balances but she was all about spreading the Gospel of the Lost Cause and connecting what the south went through during the War of Northern Aggression and afterward to the way conservatives had been treated in the 60’s and 70’s and now Reagan was leading them out of the wilderness and yes I know I’m mixing my Biblical references here but so did she.

When I was writing this poem, I wondered what that teacher had been up to in the now 40 or so years since I was in her classroom. I fully expected to see her on social media wearing MAGA gear, possibly engaging in some light treason in January of 2021. Or maybe she’d have mellowed some. I mean, I was a very conservative person in my early 20’s—Jehovah’s Witness, remember—and I am what most conservatives today would call a radical socialist Marxist so I’m just generally liberal. Who knows how people can change, right?

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Well I can report to you…nothing. I can’t find her online at all. Which is probably for the best. More of us should be impossible to find online.

This section of the poem mostly aims at that classroom experience. The line about “our town’s / namesake had begged for backup” is a reference to John Slidell’s failed mission to convince England to back the Confederacy during the Civil War. I hope you like it.

Here’s part 5 of Reclamation

I guess our Civics teacher saw potential,

so she preached us Reaganomics, tax cuts,

hyper-patriotism. She taught the bravery

of eking out an independent life.

But we were England’s, still colonials,

she said, tax slaves told by God to spread

freedom down the seaboard, then west to

the Mississippi and beyond, wherever

blood and soil made wealth from cotton baled

white and high as the chalk cliffs on the southern

coast of the country we pulled away from

two hundred years ago, country our town’s

namesake had begged for backup when we

fought a second war of independence.

She said we’d lost our chance at freedom then

but now here was a chance to take it back.

Thanks as always for reading. I’m interested in your stories about feeling like an outsider or separated from a wider group. Or even about your wildly inappropriate teachers.

Though none of us lived near the actual swamp, we were old enough to understand the danger of where we were headed, far enough from roads and ambulances and hospitals and close enough to water moccasins and alligators that we needed to pay attention. We wondered aloud about what other beasts we might encounter—black bear, wild boar, somebody’s pet python they’d got tired of buying feed store rats for and just let loose—but what all the adults were most worried about was some of us getting lost.

Our guide had contour maps of the whole area and he showed them to us but he also let us know that they weren’t all that helpful except for the broad strokes because the river made and washed away new islands on a whim, sluicing channels through islands that had risen up the week before. Every trip was a new one in a way. What had once been a channel wide enough for an air boat could catch canoes, and if you stepped out to push yourself free, you would probably lose a boot in the sticky mud.

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From the teachers’ perspective it was a perfect trip. Nobody got in a fistfight, nobody got lost, and nobody tried to sneak off and get lost either, not even for a little while. Everybody got back to the school, bug-bitten and smelly and uninjured.

The swamp is a perfect place to get lost in or disappear into, depending on what you need, which is not to say doing so is a smart idea, even if you know how to get lost in a swamp. Most of the stories I have heard in my life about people who took to the swamp involved desperation, even the more romanticized ones.

The popular conception of who lives in the swamps of south Louisiana is of the Cajuns, and I honestly don’t know how much y’all actually know about Cajuns, and by y’all I mean all y’all because I cannot count the times I’ve told people not from Louisiana that I’m from Louisiana (specifically the New Orleans suburb of Slidell) where they’ve replied “but you don’t have a Cajun accent.” To which I politely reply “oh, no, Cajun country is further south and west” but really what I want to say is something I’m not going to put into this post. My gut tells me that when most Americans hear the word Cajun they think of Tabasco sauce, Cajun Pawn Stars and Gambit from the X-Men.

And I’m not here to talk like I’m some great expert on Acadiana and the people from the area. I am absolutely not. I just know enough to realize that.

The very simplified story goes that after the 7 Years War between Britain and France, the Acadians were expelled from Nova Scotia and some of them made their way south to the French colony of Nouvelle Orleans, and many of them moved south and west from there into the Atchafalaya Basin, which is not all swamps. There’s a lot of agriculture in that area—sugar cane, rice, soybeans—as well as ranching, and during the oil boom of the 70’s a lot of the locals went to work on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

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But there’s also a lot of swamps, and if you’re the type of person who wants others to leave you alone, a swamp is a choice, especially if you’re still friendly with or related to the people on the edge of the swamp who have access to things that make your life a little easier in harsh conditions. And there were and are s fair number of people in that area who still want to live that life.

But swamps have historically also been homes to people who need to disappear or at least relocate from their current arrangement, and who have people looking for them. People on the run, let’s say. Okay, enough with the euphemisms. For long periods of US history, swamps were homes to people who were trying to escape from slavery.

These people came to be known as maroons and they formed settlements throughout the deep south as well as in Virginia and the Great Dismal Swamp. These settlements were isolated and hidden and it’s not exactly clear how much independence these groups had. There’s some suggestion that nearby whites would leave the maroons alone and even trade with them, but more often the powerful whites, who lived in constant fear of a slave revolt, tried to use military force to capture the maroons, either re-enslaving them or executing them.

The first stories I remember reading about these groups was about the Black Seminoles in Florida, mostly in the context of the Seminole Wars (yet another reason to get Andrew Jackson off of US currency) but I feel it necessary to point out that I learned about these groups as an adult, and not like a young adult either. Less than 20 years ago, certainly.

Why is that important? Well because it wasn’t until I had decided to write about the poem I’ll get to in a minute that it even occurred to me to wonder if there had ever been maroon settlements in the Honey Island Swamp, the place we went on that field trip in eighth grade, the very year we were studying Louisiana history.

Get ready to be not surprised. This is Jean Saint Maló, a maroon who escaped from a plantation on the Mississippi above New Orleans.

His main camp was in Bas du Fleuve, along the banks of Lake Borgne but he used the entire area around the Rigolets to operate in. He and his party would occasionally raid plantations and kill cattle, but they mostly tried to produce food and goods for trade. When they engaged in violence, it was mostly defensive, but they were still considered an existential threat to the slave-owning whites in the area who at this time (the 1780’s) were largely Spanish. In 1784, the Spanish colonial government captured Maló and executed him.

I’m going to quote some from this piece by Chris Dier, 2020 Louisiana Teacher of the Year and National Teacher of the Year Finalist.

His legacy helped inspire the German Coast Uprising along the Mississippi River in 1811, the largest slave insurrection in United States history. San Malo did more than inspire hope for a life of freedom for the enslaved. Sometime between the 1820s and 1830s, a Spanish ship leaving the Spanish East Indies, present-day Philippines, docked at New Orleans. A group of Filipinos seized the opportunity to abandon ship. These Filipinos, skilled and adept at life on the water, sought refuge on the shores of Lake Borgne, in modern-day St. Bernard Parish, away from the hustle and bustle of one of the largest ports in the Americas. They named their newfound settlement Saint Malo after hearing stories of the legend. It was the first Filipino settlement in the United States. 

Turns out that some of those Filipinos and their descendants were recruited by Jean Lafitte, the pirate who supported US forces during the Battle of New Orleans (under fuckhead General Andrew Jackson) in the War of 1812, or more accurately, after the War of 1812 had ended but before anyone in New Orleans knew it.

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That sounds like the kind of thing you might expect to learn about in a Louisiana history class, right? Maybe? It’s been a long time but I believe the only time we learned about a slave revolt in my history classes it was Nat Turner and there was a lot of focus on how mean he was to white people. Nothing about why enslaved people might want to rebel or escape, nothing about their treatment or what it meant in practical terms to be owned, considered property by another. And certainly nothing about the lengths that slaveholders were willing to go to in order to preserve their wealth and status.

Just now I looked up Saint Malo, Louisiana, to see what I could find about this place founded by escaped Filipinos. (Here’s a link to the historical marker for the site.) It was washed away by the New Orleans hurricane of 1915. I don’t even know what to say about this, except that it fits, I guess. The water continually remakes the landscape and if you don’t have the power to rebuild, then you mostly disappear. What histories have we lost?

This journey for me started because I read January Gill O’Neil’s latest book Glitter Road and while I could have chosen a dozen different poems for this newsletter, I went with this one titled “The River Remembers,” first published on December 27, 2021 in Sierra, The Magazine of the Sierra Club. The publication date and her bio suggests that this poem was probably written while she was the 2019-20 Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, and I really enjoyed seeing this landscape through her eyes.

The poem begins “Here the water is silt brown / stretches mile-wide, / flat as a washed-out conveyor belt.” I feel like I’ve been here, both on the river and with the conveyor belt from my days working in a grocery warehouse, the flatness disappearing into the distance, the heat engulfing you, not quite smothering but let the sun crawl past noon and the humidity come up a couple more points and you’ll be sweating without moving. Even the lukewarm water of the river feels cool then.

            I can’t read the River, can’t see my hand

            when it plunges elbow-deep

                        to feel the cool against

                                    the Mississippi heat­—

                        hot as a dog’s mouth.

That last line is so perfect. I’ve never made that connection between the unrelenting hot-wetness of a summer day in the south and the slobbery mouth of a dog.

They’re canoeing on the Mississippi, it seems, which means they’re dodging river traffic, “trash barges and tugboats,” but they’re also far from population centers.

                        Farm, farm, tumbledown shack.

            Creeks and rivers bifurcate the land like blood veins.

            Here the GPS gives up.

That line made me laugh the first time I read it, because while I remember clearly times in my life where it was easy to get lost in the country, I’ve also gotten used to the idea that the little computer I carry in my pocket will always know where I am, so the idea that I’d look at it and it would give me a shruggie is hilarious. The poem continues:

                        New islands form at the current’s whim

                                    and what is untouched grows lush and verdant.

                        Willow and privet border the collapsing coastline.

            A carp leaps into the boar when it hears us coming.

            We stop here in an oxbow, gumbo mud sticks to our feet.

                        River rock. Plastic. Fossils. Gar.

                                    Raccoon and coyote leave tracks in the rust-colored sand.

That’s such an interesting collection of objects on the riverside to me. River rock predates anything else in the area, even the river. Gar are practically living fossils, but in the middle of it, plastic which is man-made but may outlast everything around it. And then, on the next line so separated from the list, are what’s alive today, raccoons and coyotes, going about their lives.

                        The slaves—sold down the river—hid here,

            waited for their chance to escape up north,

            hid in caves, fled to the Twin Cities and Canada,

                        their fate at the mercy of the river’s next rise.

One of the other things we weren’t taught about much in school (beyond the existence of Harriet Tubman) was just how hard it was for enslaved people to get far enough north to start new lives. I remember being surprised at learning about how many of them who managed to get out of the deep south then had to keep going all the way to Canada because the Fugitive Slave Law meant even the North wasn’t safe for them.

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But it wasn’t until I was much older that I learned that being “sold down the river” was often a punishment for recaptured escapees. It was harder to get north, especially over land, from deeper in the south. That’s no doubt part of the reason why maroon communities developed. When faced with the choice of either a dangerous overland journey north through an unfamiliar and hostile landscape or trying to stow away on a ship and successfully hide for the length of the trip up the Atlantic coast, living in the swamp adjacent to the places and people you know might seem like a solid option.

The poem closes with these lines:

                                    Here’s the nadir of our suffering,

                        which started in one place to end in another.

            Here’s where flow and marvel and history converge.

            This harmjoy. This beautiful sadness.

Look at how the word “our” simultaneously expands and contracts this poem. The entire poem has been in this first person plural voice, but it’s read like the speaker is in the boat with another person, and the reader is listening to them recount the trip. But “our suffering” is expansive in that it refers to a much larger group of people, the descendants of the slaves who hid in and lived in these swamps, along these riverbanks, in hopes of grabbing freedom for themselves and their people.

But it contracts the poem as well, at least for someone like me, and to be clear this is a good thing. As a white southerner, I’m not part of this group. My Irish ancestors might have fled poverty and persecution (I say might because I don’t actually know why they came here, but it was a common story) but they were never enslaved or treated worse than freed black people after the Civil War no matter how much white supremacists try to claim it. Irish immigrants had it hard in a lot of places but never like this.

I can bear witness to that suffering, to that harmjoy and beautiful sadness, but it’s not mine. And in some small way, maybe I can help bring attention to the ignored and erased stories of these people who risked everything to try to get free.

Thanks for reading, as always. If you have stories like these, I’d love to hear them or read about them.

The wider world was New Orleans, which I went to rarely. It was bridges and bridges away, the kind of place I could get lost in and I didn’t like being lost. It was also full of sin which scared me because I wanted it so much and I knew it. The elders in our congregation, my dad among them, would tell us that the danger of sin was that you’d accidentally get close and be sucked in like quicksand,* but my problem was that I knew I wanted to dive face-first into it and I still believed too hard in the promise of everlasting life in paradise to chance it.

And honestly, that was kind of the extent of my world. I’d been other places, for vacations, for Jehovah’s Witnesses conventions. I’d been to Brooklyn to visit the world headquarters (of which there is no sign any longer). I’d read about other places, voraciously in some cases, but they weren’t real to me the way the corner store at Cousin and Front St with the Defender video game and the quarter juice plastic bottles shaped vaguely like hand grenades was real. Not real like the grass in front of the Bud’s Broiler on Sgt Alfred where I rolled around after bouncing my bike over the hood of a car on my way to sign up for summer school Driver’s Ed.

That’s an unfair comparison, of course. The place you live will always be more real to you than any place you imagine, but the wider world was also distant to me because I never really had any hope of experiencing it. We were never going to travel overseas—by this point my dad had already traded his full-time job for a part-time one to become a full-time volunteer preacher and my mom was about to do the same, so money was tight again, but also they never seemed to have much interest in doing it.

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Even if my family had gone, what would we have done? Every part of our lives was lived through the lens of being a Jehovah’s Witness. We’d have toured the local branch office of whatever country we were in, gone to meetings there, talked with these people we’d met about how amazing it was that we truly were an international brother and sisterhood. Maybe we’d have gone to a museum, or a castle, but even there we’d have made snide remarks to each other about the religious iconography and how wrong their beliefs were. When your whole personality is built around the belief that you and only you know the TRUTH about the Bible and Christianity, you’re pretty insufferable. Besides, there’d be plenty of time to go there after Armageddon when we’d restored the entire earth to paradise conditions and then we wouldn’t have to deal with all that worldly stuff.

Still, I was in high school, with all the angst and emotion that brings, and I saw my school friends rebelling in ways large and small and I desperately wanted to rebel with them. I did in small ways when I was around them. I shoplifted porn from any number of convenience stores, cursed an unnecessary amount, as though I thought if I did it twice as much at school then it would be out of my system and I wouldn’t do it at home (that mostly worked), I hit on girls who weren’t Witnesses very unsuccessfully, drank when I could get an adult to buy it for me. Normal stuff.

And I wrote. That might have been my greatest sin. It was my favorite one.

I mostly wrote poems, the kind you expect an angsty high-school boy who reads Cummings and Baudelaire and listens to prog rock and new wave and this new music called hip-hop and soul and top 40 and anything that either gets played on the radio or that you can buy for $2 from the remaindered bin at the record store to write. I wrote stories also, mostly copies of stories I’d read in other places with marginal changes (plagiarized, let’s be honest). I stole dialogue from Watchmen for one, I remember. I thought I was slick. (I was not slick). But this is how we learn.

I sat in the back of my classrooms because it was easier to hide that I was mostly either reading something other than what was being discussed or writing something not connected to class. Also, it was closer to the windows and if our high school had air conditioning, it was not effective. Not that there was ever much of a breeze coming off Lake Pontchartrain unless there was a storm coming in which meant you soaked up as much of that chill that preceded the heavens opening up because the windows were closed tight against the torrents.

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That’s when this section of the poem takes place. Junior year US history, spring term, 1986 I guess. It had to be the spring because we were reading about the Civil War, aka The War Between the States to most of the school faculty, the War of Northern Aggression to one of them. There’s a poem by Natasha Trethewey called “Southern History.” Pretty much that, only I was a white dude in the classroom so I didn’t have near the same experience or reaction to it as she did. Which is what I’m kind of getting at starting in my third line when I say “We didn’t care what happened / In Massachusetts, in Virginia.” It was words on a page to me, words I needed to be able to identify on a test in a couple of weeks, and I could do that easy.

What mattered to me and the non-Witness friends I had at school was what we wrote, what we listened to, the tapes we swapped and copied. And we had to get music that way because the radio stations we picked up were just the big ones and the record stores were mostly in malls and department stores and would never carry anything punk or new wave unless it was radio-friendly so forget Black Flag or Violent Femmes or Siouxsie and the Banshees or Robyn Hitchcock or The Smiths. On a stormy night, if there was just enough electricity in the air, we could sometimes pick up the college radio stations from Tulane. And for a brief glorious moment there was a Sunday night show on WQUE called the New Music Revue with Coyote J Calhoun. We wanted to pour those emotions onto paper and share them with each other but only with each other.

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Some of our teachers knew we wrote and they encouraged us. They got us involved in the school literary magazine. I got to be an editor for the parish lit mag too. And we submitted and published poems and stories in those places but never the stuff we wrote for each other. That was ours. I gave the magazine the poems that fit the persona I wanted to be, that I wanted the audience to see.

I guess I hoped they’d see me as something other than what they saw every day. I know I wanted to be something other than that, but I didn’t know how. I just knew how to be conflicted, how to wear the face that fit in with the people I was around.

Here’s section 4 of Reclamation:

That fall we studied US history
in sweaty Slidell classrooms, south-facing 
sunny windows. We didn't care what happened
in Massachusetts, in Virginia,
not really even in New Orleans across
the lake which sent dark clouds each afternoon,
thickened the air to roux. Bolded names and battles
told us what to study should we
decide it mattered more than writing our fears
in secret notebooks we'd swap at lunch
sure that no one in the world had felt
this way before, not even Morrissey;
maybe Robert Smith and Siouxsie Sioux
who we only ever heard on stormy nights
when the air was electric, boosted WTUL
to radios we hid beneath our pillows.

Thanks as always for reading. I had a harder time approaching this section than I thought I would, and then work ramped up and I made excuses and crocheted a lot and let the not-writing take over me. Then on Thursday I went with my kids on a school trip to a performance at the Civic Center of a play/dance based on the book What Do You Do With an Idea?” by Kobi Yamada and I was invigorated and I’m going to try to ride this feeling for as long as I can, work be damned. If the show comes to your area, go see it.

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*There’s a joke about GenX believing quicksand would be a much larger part of our lives because of tv but that really is the metaphor they used.  

When I was a kid in church, the phrase “knowledge of good and evil” was always presented as a consequence of disobedience. Had Adam never eaten from it, then humans would never have sinned or fallen from God’s grace and paradise would never have been taken away from us, so the story went. Mind you, there’s nothing in the story to back that reading up. There’s no evidence that the tree would cease to exist or that future generations wouldn’t have to pass their own obedience tests. Now I’m imagining a scenario where this test becomes a rite of passage, where when children reach a certain age, they have to face off against the tree one-on-one, and if they resist the temptation to eat, they get to continue their lives in the garden and if they fail, they’re cast out into the world beyond the walls and none of the faithful ever see or hear of them again. Hmmm.

The part of the story that always fascinated me most was how the serpent presented the tree to Eve. God just told Adam the name of the tree and forbade it; the serpent told Eve what eating from it would do to her. God promised swift punishment—“for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die”—but the serpent promised growth and transformation, that “you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” And it always felt to me, even when I was a believer, that God was playing fast and loose with his words because “in the day that you eat from it” sure felt to me like the fruit had cobra venom in it or something. The elders in my church later explained that “day” could be used metaphorically when they needed to use it metaphorically. Other parts of the Bible could only be read literally, and they were the ones who knew the difference. Convenient, that.

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In the story the serpent was indeed lying, but only in the “you will not die” part of the conversation. The rest of what the serpent said was true, that the effect of eating the fruit would make them like God in terms of knowing good and evil, no matter what definition you use for “know,” the “understand the difference” or “determine for yourself” or even the carnal knowledge version. What I think all these definitions have in common, though, is that they’re connected to the ability to imagine alternate futures or paths for ourselves and others. If we’re conscious of ourselves, we must be able to imagine what if.

Maybe that’s what it is to be like God, knowing good and evil. Maybe it’s the ability to look back at what, in retrospect, seem to be cusp moments and wonder what would have happened if we’d made a different choice. Goodness knows writers and other artists have burned plenty of brain cells exploring those potential storylines, and some of them have even been pretty compelling. Others, not so much. I’m thinking of you, Mr. Destiny.

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I’ve had the poem I’m about to write about open in a tab on my iPad for a couple of months at least, trying to think of a way to get into it. I’ve started this post a half-dozen times at least, written three or four paragraphs and then pushed them away. In one, I wrote about my meager attempts to write short stories set in a universe with superheroes, but it turned into thinking about how those are all war stories with the victims largely erased; another would have required me to re-watch significant parts of Mr. Destiny for the first time in at least 30 years and I tapped out of that pretty quickly; a third included a list of all the times I could have died earlier in my life and a wonder if maybe of all the Brian’s in all the universes out there, I’m the last one standing. I’m not going to list them all. Suffice to say that this is the one that’s held this long.

The poem is Carl Dennis’s “The God Who Loves You.” I don’t remember exactly how I came to see it—my gut currently says someone posted it on Bluesky because that’s about the only place I’m online these days—but I read it and then reread it and it’s been worming around in my head ever since then, enough that I think I need to locate a copy of Practical Gods, the volume it comes from.

There’s an interesting detachment in the voice in this poem right from the opening lines:

It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.

In those first lines Dennis locates us in a universe not only with gods, but with a speaker who is able to comment on both the relationship between the subject, the you of the poem, and the god who at the very least has knowledge of the future, though it’s unclear…well, I don’t want to spoil anything.

It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.

So many of those stories I mentioned earlier where the protagonist imagines the life they’d have had if only one thing had gone differently focus on the idea that the other life would have been better, and predictably, once the main character experiences the other life, they recognize how much they love the things they had. This part of the poem is playing in a similar sandbox, but mutes it some by making the choice something less obvious, where you went to college and who you connected with as opposed to, I don’t know, hitting a home run instead of striking out to end the big game. Jim Belushi, I fucking swear to god.

I do think it’s kind of cute, though, that Dennis throws in a Jesus reference there, just casually, because he's playing with the question of why an omnipotent god who knows not just everything that happens but that could happen would allow his creation to suffer, or if not suffer exactly, then not live their lives to the fullest possible extent of happiness.

You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold ffrom your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.

I like this turn here, where Dennis has moved the perspective from the you of the poem onto the god, where the you who possibly has never even thought of these possible other lives is now responsible for the feelings of the god who has all this other knowledge. And he does it while making the you of the poem a little more pathetic.

And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you’re used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You’re spared by ignorance?

I think I laughed audibly when I read this the first time, perhaps uttered an expletive or two at the audacity of the lines. The continued move here, to place the negative emotion on knowing how this knowledge pains this god rather than on the you who is apparently both missing out on a better life and condemning his family to a less enjoyable one, even if it’s only by 30 points on an unnamed scale, is pretty impressive. It’s hard for me to decide what’s more insulting, honestly, that this god cares enough about my life to be bothered that I didn’t get what it thinks was the best one for me or that I would give a shit about this god’s feelings in the first place. But Dennis isn’t done upping the stakes.

The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the God who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine, scene by scene

And this is where Dennis begins to return power to the you of the poem, because I think the reader has been imagining an omnipotent god this whole time, the Christian god specifically given the “thorn in the side” line earlier, but that God can’t be compelled to imagine anything. I suppose a truly omnipotent God would be able to both keep track of every person’s current and missed lives and be troubled by them while simultaneously keeping the rest of the universe moving and occasionally putting down rebellions and planning for whatever version of the end times eventually comes but at this point we’re talking about something beyond imagination. We can’t grasp it.

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Did you notice I broke that last quote in the middle of a sentence?

Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven’t written in months. 

Yes. The knowledge of good and evil is our ability to imagine all these possibilities, including a god who loves us or even one who isn’t paying attention to us at all. It’s imagining that we’re living our best possible life or our worst one or even not worrying about what other us’s are doing in other universes.

Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.

I especially like that Dennis closes the poem with a command, not just because I happen to agree with the sentiment, but because the poem has spent the whole time on the page at this kind of remove. Go back and look at the way each of the sentences begin. There’s very little directness in them. A couple start with “it must be” and a couple start with “and” and the result is that the reader can be lulled into forgetting that the whole poem is directly addressing them.

But not those closing lines. Dennis is, oddly enough, kind of speaking with the voice of God here. Sit down and write your friend and talk about your life with them, and listen to them talk about theirs. This is the one you know you have. Don’t fuck it up.

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Thanks as always for reading. These posts appear first at my personal website, also (confusingly?) called Another Poem to Love. Hope to see you there, or here, or on Bluesky, the only social media platform I’m on, and I’m on there sparingly. I think I’m going to write some old friends now.

Slidell was a suburb when I lived there, a bedroom community. Most adults worked in New Orleans like my parents did. They drove the Twin Spans or Highway 11 across the lake, past the castle in Irish Bayou, the Lake Forest Mall that had the ice skating rink in the middle of it, across the High Rise and into the city. It was an hour or so each way, depending on the traffic and the weather and especially if there was a wreck on one of the bridges.

This was the late 70’s, early 80’s, and as too many Gen Xers will tell you online, it was a time when many of us spent a lot of time alone or with each other. Lots of cultural commentators over the last 30 plus years have said some pretty stupid stuff in my opinion about how things were so much greater when kids had a lot more autonomy and freedom away from their parents and other adults, but I think there’s a reason why a lot of Gen X kids became helicopter parents, and it’s because we knew on some level that even if bad shit didn’t happen to us specifically, that was more a matter of luck than anything else. And most of us knew someone who’d gotten hurt or worse.

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And to be clear, sometimes we got hurt because we were alone and making bad decisions and sometimes it was because we were with our peers and we goaded each other into bad decisions and sometimes it was because there was an adult around who had bad intentions and I had experiences with all three of those scenarios more than once and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t affect the way I’ve parented my three children over the last three-plus decades.

That said, I can’t deny that I got a lot out of the adults in our lives making us entertain ourselves. Some of it—like learning just how quickly a flame will travel back up an aerosol spray can stream—was maybe a lesson I didn’t really need to learn when I was 11, but I also learned to gut and scale a catfish at that age and thus was never under any illusions where a big part of my diet came from.

When I use the word suburb, I usually think of subdivisions, of big-box stores and strip malls and people who don’t often know their neighbors and Slidell had plenty of that, but because it was small and on the outer edge of the suburbs right about the time New Orleans stopped growing, it also had those places where the rural was just right there. Where one side of the street was starter homes and the other side was pine woods, where just a block away you might see a gravel drive with a trailer and a clearing with a concrete slab next to it, plumbing and conduit for electrical wiring sticking up out of it where walls would one day be framed up around them.

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Some of my Witness friends lived on one of these streets, just 3 blocks away from the strip mall with the A&P grocery on one end and the K&B pharmacy on the other with the first Popeye’s I ever ate at sitting in the parking lot which was across the street from the Winn Dixie strip mall that had the only first-run movie theater in town in the corner and beyond that the book store where I got my copy of E. E. Cummings A Selection of Poems when I was a junior in high school.

But on the other side of the street, it was woods and ponds and a place we called Gar Creek because that was the biggest fish you could hope to catch in it, though catching one was the childhood fishing equivalent of the dog that caught the car because even on the one occasion where we landed one, we couldn’t do anything with it, try as we might.

During the summers, which my sister and me and our friends spent together because while my parents where okay with us being alone at home for a couple to three hours after school, there was no way they’d let us be there all day, we’d roam those woods, or if we had a football that would hold air, we’d throw that around, or maybe hit baseballs in Billy G’s yard or ride bikes but mostly we were in the woods.

And I could paint this nostalgic picture of communing with nature but the truth is that while we did a lot of exploring and fishing, catching and throwing back the same perch a half-dozen times, we also got into mess. There was a newsstand back of the Winn Dixie that would sometimes throw out porn magazines with the covers torn off and we’d hide them in the woods, look at them even though the humidity made the pages swell and stick together after a couple of days. Some kids smoked when they could steal cigarettes. Sometimes we’d fight because we couldn’t really think of anything else to do. Sometimes we’d start a fire in a ditch and spray it with aerosol cans to watch the flames jump.

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None of us died from any of this, though we were far enough from adults that if any of us had, say, fallen from the second floor of the abandoned slaughterhouse out past Perch Pond on a road we almost never saw cars on, then yeah, someone might have. We were lucky in a lot of ways.

In “The Gift Outright,” Frost is trying to describe the way that the people he saw as Americans transformed from belonging to England to belonging to this new land, and he’s saying at the start that these colonists saw the land as belonging to them as opposed to them being a part of it. He ignores, of course, all the people who were here already, and the other groups who came here either to take it for themselves or who were brought here against their will. It’s very convenient for him to do so.

In this section of my poem, I’m trying to get at the way a place can lay a claim on a person, especially when you’re a kid getting to know the world around you, its beauties and dangers, but also how very often you don’t recognize those things while you’re in them.

Reclamation Part 3

The woods claimed us, mid-mornings, after breakfast,
The Price is Right, Press Your Luck. We had planned
before. We were her people. She was ours in
pine trees, poison sumac. Shorty claimed
he’d seen a black bear once but no one
believed him. Still, I slipped the knife
my uncle passed down to me one camping
trip in Arkansas onto my belt the next few days.
We’d walk and fish past lunch—it sounds 
so much more romantic now—until the heat
and mosquitos reminded us whose land
this really was. Our houses weren’t much
but they were hardened against pest and heat
and Philip’s mom sometimes had cable.
We’d lounge on the floor under the ceiling fans
and complain there was nothing to do.

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