April 30, 2015The Nightly Villanelle of Their Twelfth YearShangrila Willy

“There is an apocryphal story in my family that limns a four-year-old me standing in the backyard composing poems to the trees. I’m sure they were terrible, terrible poems, but picture it as the first scene of a love story written, horrifically, by Nicholas Sparks. In the last scene, Poetry and I die together on my bed of pain having overcome consumption and the bar exam and also zombie robots. It is both a bright, sunlit day and pouring rain. In writing this poem, I wanted to evoke the narrow space of the bed in which my two hapless protagonists touch but do not touch, and to do so I pried two feet of width from the form. The result was like pirouetting in a very small closet—claustrophobic, secret, dizzying, exhilarating.”