2025-02-19: nudge

a week or so ago i mentioned an incident from when i was a kid on social media. one of my mutuals, an english teacher out east, asked me if it had ever made it into a poem. i responded it hadn't. it probably should!, he said.

you can guess where this is going. yesterday at work i was in a long meeting. i jotted a few things down in my notebook. my partner was late coming home yesterday, having a work event that ran past 5, so after i let the dogs out, i sat down with a finger of rye and just wrote. the whole poem basically tumbled out in a sitting, two pages of tercets.

this morning after making our breakfasts, lunches, coffee, i sat down to read it again. tweaked a couple of things (deleted a few words, reorganized a couple of sentences), but otherwise didn't change anything. i've been writing a bunch of things this year that i don't think i'll ever publish, for various reasons, but this feels like it could go in my MS. i sent off another sample to a publisher last month: if they want to read the whole thing, this poem is going in.

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