So apparently the way Word Raccoon now alerts me that she’s finished writing poetry for the day is by insisting on an orange and eating the segments while I beg her not to drip on the keyboard.

While she ate this afternoon, she informed me that she was done. That the chapbook, the newest, a draft of it anyway, was finished.

No additions, please.

When I woke this morning, I figured today was going to be a relaxing, read-and-stay-warm kind of day.

I started out reading a craft book by a poet I met in Paris a few years ago. I didn’t expect a line of hers to strike something in me, but it did. (It suggested something to me; I didn’t use her line.)

Before I knew it, WR was putting a 1970s chocolate commercial in a poem. A love poem.

I’ve warned her about those.

She chortled and wrote the titles of sixteen more poems-to-be in my notes app.

“I hope you don’t think I’m writing all of those today,” I said. She said she’d be happy to do it for me, but just like you’d rather drive your kid to the event yourself, even in your jammies, because you want to make sure they’re safe, I took the phone.

I watched TV. I ate lunch. I still imagined I’d be able to go upstairs and retrieve my Joan Didion book and have my planned day.

Of course not.

The beast whispered, “You already have the titles. The poems will practically write themselves.”

I should note that I am not in the habit of writing titles before poems.
Especially not a whole chapbook’s worth, complete with a title. I was intrigued. 

The proposed title?

Collaborating with a Ghost

A sampling of the titles:

Spatchcocking Our Love

Ghost in the Kitchen with Fried Green Tomatoes

Haunted Ventriloquism 101

Weird Eye Contact with the Soul

I thought (here’s where I went wrong) that these would be entertaining, easy poems to write.

Well. I was partially right. Once I agreed to sit down and take a closer look at the titles, the poems did half write themselves.

However.

However, they were not light and fun. They had their moments (WR was giggling, but she can be overly serious, too.)

Anyway.

They are what they are. 

We listen and don’t judge (ha!), and now I have a new chapbook in drafts.

WR is starving, so before I go feed her (I guess the orange didn’t stick), let me say how delighted I was when I listened to The Book Review Podcast today and heard there’s a book of essays coming out about Morrison’s work.

“Jim or Toni? Jim or Toni?” WR shouted, delighted when she heard Toni.

While she might have read the book either way, she is wild about Toni Morrison’s writing. In fact, she remembers exactly where she was when she sadly read of Morrison’s passing.

She cannot wait to read On Morrison by Namwali Serpell.

And neither can I.