My apologies for having been long absent, Blogger friends...

My apologies for having been long absent, Blogger friends, but I've been hard at work on a new batch of Monhegan-inspired poems, plus I managed to slip down to South Carolina for a few days to spend some quality time with my brother, his wife and kids, and my sister and her three girls. I had such a great time! I'm so lucky to have such awesome nieces--and one nephew (sorry for your misfortune, Jake). Anyway, I'm back in Columbus now, potentially for good, and (relatively) ready to start work on fall syllabi, new/old poems, and the business of getting ahead, though the summer continues to dump its terrifying heat index all over us, and that means no running outside for me for a while. After three days in a row of a fast five miles by the harbor down in Hilton Head, the gym seems beyond depressing. And here's another Sinéad Morrissey poem, this one dedicated to my sister-in-law who's been having some trouble sleeping lately...

Contrail

Nightly now, insomnia lays its thumb
upon my forehead-- an any how, Ash Wednesday cross.
Which, instead of insisting Thou Shalt Pass

to the Angel of Anxiety, hovering over the stairway,
beckons it in, at 3am, to unsettle me gently
with its insidious wings

Sometimes my mother and father.
Sometimes neither.
Sometimes childlessness, stretching out into the ether

like a plane.