I met Barry Hannah once in my life. I’d come to Oxford, MS, to meet an entirely different writer whom I thought then and think now very highly of. I’d also come to escape from another slew of regrets. Oxford is a great city to run away to.

So it's me and two other girls...

He repeated these six words like a prayer. His only confession.

Come, bring your sadness to the precipice of my body, bury it within me like a tool

He first saw her stepping off a water taxi by the Long Docks in the rain at night, her right arm atrophied from some early childhood disease, dangling like an apology, her other holding a cigarette. Her wet black hair hung past her shoulders and her eyes

1. The sparrows' heads revolve slowly when you press the red button, but the boxing glove attachments don't work.2. A weird weaving of voices, unmusical harmony. One phrase punctures the texture: “The empty slot.”3. Poems are processed into more useful verbal…

I worry for the daffodils/ and there optimistic yellow bursts./ I worry for the over-eager clover,// prodigious green on crepe myrtles,/ even for the early green of nut grass.

Two summers later, the ritual began. Carol left her house at midnight, having served her husband and daughter a heavy dinner that left them caged in their sleep. She was like a thief working in reverse: she rose from bed with her husband’s first snore,

[TURN-ONS: willingness. TURN-OFFS: rejection.]

One of the poems in my collection, One Day Tells its Tale to Another, published December 16, 2012. Available on Amazon. My first book!

If the Titanic rises from the bottom of the sea, I will meet you on deck, in a deck chair. Fully dressed for a change.

For a few/ vivid weeks, deciduous shrubs and trees/ will seem to glow like flames and embers

...you should pick a VERY OLD millionaire. Very old, and NOT VERY WELL...

Now they are sleeping in a poppy field, sun-drenched warm afternoon girls lying on their stomachs and sides, faces in flowers, and flowers blowing, blowing. If this afternoon were every afternoon, the world would be cured.

Something was changing. We could sense it in the circling air. A loss of stillness - and we'd been still for so long.