If you look at the poems in Prelude, you can identify the later material by identifying the poems with more white space and unexpected line breaks. Grief did that to me and my writing. It exploded my expectations and introduced these blank pockets of deep feeling. My prose writing became more fluid and lyrical…

In that way we were both just like each other. We both allowed too deep of a contrast between our interiors and our exteriors. We both clung to self-assured masks that actually allowed us to cause ourselves more unseen harm.

We dialed the newly dead
but they wouldn't answer. We texted,
begging us to call them back, but
the newly dead don't know how to
read. In America, a gathering of people
is called target practice or a funeral,
depending on who lives long enough
to define the terms.

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