My mother's body wouldn't recover so much as bide its time against her heart's inevitable betrayal. - Saeed Jones

The sweetness we deny ourselves because the world is wailing.

Who are you the morning after the most beautiful man you have ever kissed tries to kill you? And the morning after that? How about the following week?

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…