From Transmitter and Receiver. Published by Nightwood Editions in 2015.
Permission to use that snowball you’ve been keeping in the freezer since 1998. For a poem? she asks. What else? I say. I’ll trade you, she says for that thing your mom said at the park. What was it? “God, that mallard’s being a real douchebag”? Yes, that one. Deal, I say. Okay, how about the Korean boy who walks past our house late at night, singing “Moon River”? Oh, you can use that, I say, I wouldn’t even know what to do with it. But there is something else. I’ve been wanting to write about the black skirt we’ve been using to cover the lovebird’s cage. The goodnight skirt. In exchange, I’ll let you have our drunken mailman, the tailless tabby, and I’ll throw in the broken grandfather clock we found in the forest. One more, she says. Last night, I say. The whole night. She considers for a while, then, Okay, that’s fair. But I really had something going with that lovebird. All right, I say, write it anyway. If it’s more beautiful than mine, it’s yours.
