I think that text is an image. It’s a sign, it’s a symbol. An “A” is an image of an “A,” which represents a sound. In that way, it’s all marks on a page, but the white space is also a mark on the page.

“I used to be quite the singer myself,” I said. “In fact, I used to sing with the band.”

“So you’re Benny?”

I breathed through the tube and didn’t die, and finally I looked down and saw them. All these small fish streaking by, silvery and orange and pink, hermit crabs scuttling around the rocks, tufts of seagrass with tiny shrimp.

I told everyone, when I wrote the note I was thinking of sand.

I told everyone, when I wrote the note it was sand.

My mother knows nothing

more than I do but she carries it better.

If she were a metaphor I could turn into her.

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.