1/30/13

I submitted the poems

after a hasty, intoxicated 

rewrite at 4 in the morning

only a few short

days after the deadline.

I had just come from a vigil

for a friend’s mother 

who lay, emaciated

her white skin on white sheets

and when I left 

I gulped fresh air

and erased the dead 

words in my poems

and sent them away.

I wrote this poem on a bus

lurching through the rain

dusk setting gently all about

like it does on white
winter afternoons.