I Watch the Ripples Change Their Size

I wish I could tell you it’s going to be okay.Terry Gross will interview you, you’ll win a prize! Your editor will be charming and alarming. Buckets of moonbeams in your hair. Is it hyperbolic to say writing saved my life? Poetry saved my life? That therapy and meds saved my life, but really without all those fucking journals, the pages tufted from pressing too hard, from pressing too hard in general, from wanting to be someone else and understanding that misery and happiness were not opposite sides of the same coin. I wish I could say getting published will change your life, or that one accomplishment or another will be enshrined in the tree of life. I wish I could say ten years of research into insect life will manifest in a garden full or neon green and the quiet sound of continuous crunching. I wish I could take you on a writer’s retreat inside a volcano and wait for it to explode.

Do you write out of pain or what?