My second home in the summer months: the cannery. Here, I stand in the damp cold, spoon in hand, scraping out the spinal bloodlines of salmon until the piles are gone.

And that's one of the things about poetry that is differentiated from prose—it can have these parallel universes as you read through it. I do think about the kind of multiverse feeling that a poem can have.

 tools to help us / be alone / miss our friends / grieve our gone our sick

& hiding is such a thrill / a grief / a waste because we see it all

The waiting room is a collage of almosts: almost asleep, almost calm, almost able to explain.

Sometimes she’ll circle whatever town we’re in with a wine bottle between her honey-brown knees, passing the bottle to me now and then, tussle my curls and kiss my hand.

Selfishly, I hope the novel and literature are around for as long as people are. It will obviously change shapes and perhaps not even be recognizable two hundred years from now, but for me, literature has given me life. I can’t think of anything that’s given me such solace and hope and beauty.