L U M I N A * N O S T R I

  I LOVE A POET who swears. Not all the time, and pretty much only  the women ones. There is something so endearing about a woman facing the storm we call life and being reduced  to the incomparable catch all phrase “Shit.”

  READ YOUR TEACHERS’ WORK I was today-years-old give or take a sleep or two when I realized I should go back and read my teachers’ work. Volumes of their poetry float about my room, cobwebs in the corners let alone for nearly a year now. But how to get through the first one whose heartbreak makes me so jealous I could spit? Or the second whose luckless lot has been spun so sharply the book burns  my finger tips with every paging turn?  Don’t get me started on the third whose written every poem there is inside me. Every single one, especially those I am too afraid to write. No other poetry is more pressing than that of my teachers, but these old masters spare no sugar. Every word and not word is salt.