A Thousand Miles from…Everywhere

In recent weeks, I have spoken to two gay poets. I don’t read much poetry but I am in awe of poets. I sometimes wish I was a poet instead of a writer. Poets are so romantic, wrapped as they are in an air of mystery, and gorgeous failure. I’ve written exactly one poem, "A Last Request." I wrote it after an editor who turned down my work insisted I should write poetry because my stories were so lyrical. So wrote it and tucked it away. At the last minute, I added it to the manuscript for Damaged Angels, my collection of short stories. I fully expected the publisher to excise it from the manuscript but they didn’t. And as it turned out, it didn’t really matter. In the first 6 months after publication we’d sold exactly 8 copies of Damaged Angels . Eight. And I bought two of those.

As I sit here having completed 1,083 words on my WIP, newly married, with three published books behind me, a thousand miles from where I began, a thousand miles from where I want to be, now seemed like a perfect time to visit that lone poem.

Read “A Last Request” now.