The crockpot is filled with a pot roast and root vegetables. Rolls are waiting to be baked for when Barry’s bestie comes over this evening. 

We have been prepping the house the past two days. It’s clean. (Not that it needed that much, but one task leads to another.)

I am getting ready to meet a friend for brunch in an hour and a half. 

I am showered. The hair is combed. I even have makeup and jewelry on.

I wrote poems yesterday morning and afternoon:

• And Now, Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Program
• Posthumous Love Letters
• Paging Superman
• Mislabeled
• Long Enough?
• Haystacks
• At Your Own Risk
• Talismans
• Gens
• Fill the Hopper 
• Another Kind of Touch
• Ashes for Beauty
• Midwestern Manners

I submitted three packets yesterday.

Recorded two rejections. (One of the journals, I had to withdraw two poems that have since been accepted elsewhere, so I don’t blame them for rejecting the other two. Though someone tell them I wasn’t rejecting them first, just doing admin.) 

RSVP’d for another anthology reading I will be doing this weekend, before a niece’s baby shower. (Sprout of life. Hopeful.) 

Received, and was pleased by, an acceptance in another anthology: Bards Against Hunger: Indianapolis (and surrounding areas, obv.) They accepted my poem “Sonshine.”

There will be a reading for the anthology. 

Speaking of readings, Word Raccoon says to tell you that not only was I asked to read after all for Moonstone Center’s reading last Sunday, but I was asked to read first. 

Breathe, enunciate, and read more slowly than you think you should. At the end, thank the host as a way of both being polite and signaling that your poem is over. Those are my rules for reading. Especially when reading unexpectedly. 

WR says performance is important too, depending on the poem. The one we read was more earnestness than fire, so we tried to read with authority but no drama. (Is that the way to do it?)

We hope our sentence patterns today, WR and I, say all that needs to be said about how things are going.

They’re going. 

They’re tough.

One foot…you know.

Yesterday afternoon, once home, WR and I wrote the toughest poem we have ever attempted. We literally yelled into a towel on the porch in front of our house, wrote a few more words, and yelled and cried again. (Thankfully the street was deserted. We don’t blame it, though when we were through we raised our tear-stained face and looked for…well, we looked.) 

We managed to write it, though, and we are filing it under “This is necessary but this is a knife and we are putting it in the metaphorical butcher’s block until absolutely necessary to pull out as it is social commentary based on personal experience.”

We don’t know if we will ever be able to read it again ourselves. 

But the poems early in the day, at the cafe, flowed more easily than expected. The barista is also a fellow artist and we both created (in between his getting coffee for others) quietly on our own, with an occasional comment. 

Actually, a conversation we had just before I settled in to write prompted my first poem, which I really enjoyed writing, the one I called “Gens.” 

“Fill the Hopper” is about, shock, Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” 

Lest you accuse me of going for low-hanging fruit (you’re not wrong), remember that fresh things can be said about anything. 

And also: accessibility, babe.

And also also: I have to get past the backlog of things in my mind that I want to write about, talk about, before I can make room for more.

Hence “Haystacks,” too. But also, I live in the Midwest where I see the same scene on repeat, and yes, it sometimes includes hay. 

This post has taken a lot of effort, and yet I feel a bit lighter for having written it. Yesterday was rough. Very. I woke up still feeling like I had an anvil chained to my ankle. 

Even now, life is a miracle, an unexplainable, magical wonder and in between the pain (which is its own exquisite joy because it means you dared loved someone even knowing what it might cost), I am grateful.

WR sticks out her tongue at any of you who think that was too much. It’s okay to be earnest once in a while. 

This is “gratitude month,” right? (That’s the best way we can frame it, considering the holiday’s origins, right?) 

It also happens to be my birth month, as my son just reminded me via text.

True, the titles to yesterday’s poems seem a bit safe and predictable. They are just drafts. Just. (Although if you ever read “Mislabeled,” you’d know it’s spot on. But I am not going to ever, ever subject you to that. That’s the one, love. That’s the one.) 

I could end this with telling you that the house is filled with the scent of beef and potatoes, and it is. I could say it smells of pumpkins and apples, and it does. 

You know what? I honestly don’t know how to end this post. 

But it came to me suddenly what will make me feel better: I will rewatch The Gilmore Girls. By the end of the series, I will be furious at them both, but especially the early seasons will be just the thing. Yes, that and a cup of tea or hot chocolate. Perfect. 

P.S. Ugh, WR says the title of this post could have been taken straight from a list called “Blog Post Title Suggestions for the Utterly Uncreative.” Sorry, It’s all I’ve got.