Looking Back on Summer

Outside the convention center in Tampa, FL

This summer was another full one. Lots of poem stuff and lots of travel mixed in with some slow living and late nights. I read AP Exams again in Tampa, got to visit friends in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for the first time, said a quick hello to Chicago, and got to know my reading chair again.

There's nothing like hanging out with poems and poets to help recharge and refocus after another busy academic year. I drank peach beer in Louisiana and cherry beer in Michigan, saw the Mackinac Bridge, drafted new poems, revised old ones, got some good news from some journals, and kept the cats nearby for all of it.

Sure I'm grateful for the time away from campus during the summer, but I'm even more grateful for the way time slows down and becomes something else, something deeper. In summer, time feels less like an adversary and more like a collaborator; on good mornings we wake up slowly over tea and decide together what kind of day we'll make.

Living as a poet makes me intensely porous to the world. Summer lets me lean in for a while so I'm ready again for my work and my poems.