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Now Playing: “Die With a Smile”: Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars

I picked up the frog today.
Yes, that frog. My ceramic prince. My chalky, paint-chipped protector with my childhood scribbles hidden on his underbelly like a secret survival spell. The one I wrote about last week (that post lives here) and today, he lives with me!

I can barely see the words I carved into him all those years ago, but I can still feel them. Literally and otherwise.

He’s heavier than I remember. So is everything. Because I didn’t just come home with a frog today.
I came home with a bread box. With photos. With a crock. With a ziplock bag of who-we-were. And a few other things I’ll share in the coming weeks.

Word Raccoon, to her credit, bought donuts this morning before my eyes were barely opened. “For the meetup,” she said. “And maybe two extra, just for… you know.” She didn’t say grief-eating, but she didn’t not say it. (Pictured above: those two “extra” donuts.)

We don’t usually eat donuts. We didn’t need donuts.
We ate the donuts.
But we shared, so really we only ate one. 

When she started squeezing peaches at the grocery, I put a halt to her shenanigans. I take produce selection seriously, and I was not in the mood that early. Besides, the peach she chose should’ve been eaten within the next ten minutes to be at its peak.

We needed something to hold on to, she said. Like a ceramic frog. Or a poem.
Speaking of which…

Something wild and wonderful is happening, and I suspect my frog prince had something to do with it, because apparently he’s my lucky charm (maybe I should make him a tiny crown): four of my poems were picked up this week by The Rye Whiskey Review. I’m so excited!

One of them, “Authorial Intent Ale,” is already out in the world over at The Rye Whiskey Review

I wrote it for a certain subset: my darling writing friends.
Dear Bro Poets: don’t hate me for the poem. You know I only speak the truth.

I’ve hung out with you at writing residencies in foreign countries, watched you suck on cigarettes like that’s where you’d find the words, sat beside you at bars. I know this is how you think. (Some of you. Many of you?)
No, not you. You know I don’t mean you.
But you others? Yeah, you.

Please don’t get butthurt, babes. (Maybe that needs to be a poem.)
I’m just suggesting you take poetry out on the road, too, and open it up, see what she’s got.
(She’s got a lot.)

And also: fuck you for not inviting me in. I had to kick the door down!
Did it occur to you once to ask if I might like to play along?
That I might not want to just listen as you watched to see if I peed myself at your enjambment?

Bro.

Love you. 😂

I am so grateful to Editor in Chief John Patrick Robbins for choosing my poems. I’ll keep you updated as the others come out. 

Heads up: One of them I wrote when I was angry. We don’t execute poems when we’re feeling better. That would be a word betrayal, and writers don’t do that, but please do keep that in mind when it gets published.

(Word Raccoon is somewhere sulking because she thinks she should have been credited. She claims she wrote it at 3 a.m. with one paw and a stolen red pen. I’m not arguing. In fact, I remember the wide grin on her face when she wrote the title “Authorial Intent Ale,” and she knew some brosephs were gonna feel seen. Or slain.)

I don’t know if the chalkware frog is truly good luck. (He is.)

I don’t know if it’s timing. (It is.) 

 But I do know this: after years of being quiet about what I want, I said, “No. That one’s mine.”

And this week, some poems said “yes” to me, too.

Bittersweet doesn’t even begin to cover it. But I’ll take the bite.

And that frog feels just right in my arms.

While I can’t, as I said, clearly make out what I wrote on its underside all of those years ago, there is a symbol I still can.

That’s poetic.

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