Cork Another

I’m working on what wants to become an essay on the latest film adaptation of Wuthering Heights. 

I don’t know why it feels like I’ll be graded on it. Who knows, maybe I’m the only one who will ever read it. 

I have a solid draft, but I’m endlessly tweaking it. 

Over the weekend, I opened the latest issue of Oxford Poetry and read something that had me going back and back, re-reading it. 

It made me write in the predawn, wrapped in a hotel blanket, an ugly one. The blanket made it into the poem.

As did creamed corn.

Similar color. 

I received a poetry rejection today and it was one of those that you think is a form rejection but you’re not sure and a rejection is a rejection, right, and they compliment everyone’s poems and say they’d like to see more, right? 

This one mattered to me. 

Actually, I received two rejections. But the other one didn’t sting. 

Sometimes it feels like someone has plucked every last feather from Emily Dickinson’s (not Bronte’s) bird of hope. If they’d give them to me, I’d make a feather duster or I’d decorate a hat with them. 

Not all of them, but a few. 

When you send your poems out in a bottle and it sinks before it reaches anyone, you cork another.

And another.

Look at that, the bird grew a new feather. 

P.S. The porch lanterns just flicked on. I’m writing out here again. I feel at home.