Books: you made it across the country!  Thanks for that.  After nearly two years without them, I have been reunited with my books!  For whatever reason, I felt kind of weird without them, and  feel totally restored now that I’ve shelved them and I can look at them. Favorites include a cookbook my grandma contributed to right before she died, a whole stack of middle school poetry journals, all my Brautigans, a really old copy of the Boxcar children, a collection of Shanley plays that I read some many times in grad school it has nearly disentigrated, same with a copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, but undergrad, and this book of poems that Literally fell onto my head in a Goodwill in High school, Home in Time by Grace Evelyn Gibson, in which you will find one of my favorite poems:

MALNUTRITION

Midwinter nights

hum as some far-off

scale quivers to mark

wasted, welling years,

balances more weight.

Weary, we comfort

hollowness with steaks

at fast-food chains, hang

our harps by the brown

rivers of cola.

Fat, lonely, we kiss

those we barely know.

Recipes for love’s

ambrosial feast

now lost, we eat swill,

despair to find what

diet hearts require.