Bread and Bread

Go toward the fluorescent light. Yesterday I went to Terry Wolverton’s annual Poetry Month workshop (more of a craft talk, actually) and reading at Skylight Books . I feel like I’ve been absent from the literary landscape for a while, and when I think about going to events, I think about seeing a lot of people I know a little bit, and explaining (or not) why I’m bald. Mingling takes energy for me even with hair, even if I have some new publication credit in my pocket. But Skylight and Terry’s crew feel like home, so it was a nice way to get my feet wet. I became a fan of some new poets (Ashaki M. Jackson—and Andrew Wessels, whom I work with three days a week but hadn’t read before), and by the end of the panel, I was jotting notes toward some kind of poem of my own. It’s below, and rough. I had a nice weekend, but it was threaded with thoughts of death, the way even some of my nicest weekends are. I watched an episode of Mad Men , in which a woman diagnosed with terminal c...