Simeon Berry

HBO. It is late and though the TV is color now, my mother and I keep custom, our immemorial vigil in the little den, remarking now and then what passes for life on the screen, speaking more to the flickering light than to each other. I spent a childhood knowing her this way, this woman well into her fourth or fifth gin and tonic. They give her a fixed, uncanny intensity. She leans forward as if driving through a snowstorm, her eyes bright, the cancer still too young to have a say in what she does,

content for now to go along for the ride. In this small room where I am watched from the shelves by photos of myself and of a lost man in uniform who stands with a young wife and children smiling from his exile in another time a young woman steps out of her shoes, slowly takes off her blouse and bra. This is new. My mother and I who used to spend our Sunday nights watching Ed Sullivan as she ironed my school clothes watch in our time-honored silence. We would like to pretend this hasn’t happened as we pretend she isn’t drunk or that last year

surgeons did not remove her breasts (ample under tight sweaters in old snapshots) in an act of flawless surgery that left her trim as a tall, tired boy. Now, before either of us can imagine what to do, a woman is stripped to the waist, moving through our inviolable den in a kind of bright hallucinatory glory, dropping her skirt and entering the shower where soaping herself to a dreamy soundtrack is all her lovely hands were ever meant to do. The camera cannot look away. This is what my mother would call smut, but it has us both entranced, trapped

before the set. Now would be the time to reprise one of our stock conversations on the injustices of the pay scale at the hospital where she works, but even the most potent of our family spells can do nothing to withstand this girl in her shower of light who bends and turns and dances, writhing in slow motion under the dazzling water, her nodding, milky mystery of flesh engulfing us. My father watches from his shelf. My mother nurses at her drink. In the unbearable silence we all hold on for dear life to the flashing screen. George Bilgere

“I spent a childhood / knowing her this way, / this woman well into / her fourth or fifth / gin and tonic. / They give her a fixed, / uncanny intensity. / She leans forward as if / driving through a snowstorm” —George Bilgere, “HBO” @umissouripress.bsky.social

THE TREES OF MADAME BLAVATSKY. There is always the cough. In the afternoon They go out for long walks as partners, Arms linked, woman and woman, Man and man, woman and man. And they keep Their feet. I can’t judge if she supports The other in green. Perhaps, they support one another? I’ve Followed them for miles and they conceal Everything in weakness. They have The hind legs of cows. When horses eat fermented hay it brings up The lining of the intestine which they Tug at

Like gloves all the way past the elbows. If we could follow them far enough we would Come to their meeting place Where they are all wired up like flowers, They live in this camp, serene and delayed. They are the oldest sopranos resuming With care the phrases, Listen, there is a song they sing at night, The regalia inside their chests, and this song, Which blames the memory, is wrong and not wrong Like a girl Showing her breasts to a boy in a cemetery. Norman Dubie

“Listen, there is a song they sing at night, / The regalia inside their chests, and this song, / Which blames the memory, is wrong and not wrong / Like a girl / Showing her breasts to a boy in a cemetery.” —Norman Dubie, “The Trees of Madame Blavatsky”

Thanks for the culinary memento mori! 💫💀💫

Ugh. I had a lawyer recommend using AI to me the other day. A LAWYER. Every morning I read GAO bid protest decisions for work, and at least once a week, some Contractor uses AI and they get called out by GAO for hallucinated decisions in its citations.

DISHES OF THE AFTERLIFE. None of the good luck foods suited us, so we pretended luck didn’t exist though clearly it did. Yet who is lucky when fortune is tied to pork? My friends and I tried to throw a party but the details were tough so we just watched a few ducks float down the ditch until it got too dark. Of course we thought the cat got out, and Carly screamed, but then he materialized in slinky velvet beneath a box that once housed a case of instant ramen. Of the seven present that night—fashioning aimless mixed drinks with cherry brandy and Sprite, attempting blackjack

with little understanding of rules—only five made it to thirty. Bored disemboweling pizza rolls and fighting over a turntable, mad someone stole a beloved wool sweater or tore the corner of a killer whale poster, did we have any sense of what an eternity meant? Dishes of the afterlife differ between cultures but my grandmother never passed up a chance to slander birds, so no chicken or quail on the docket as we low-key avoid talking about important things. I’m wishing I had not burned the photo of Savannah dressed as

a Victorian ghost, which would be an improvement compared to present, where she occupies some urn or ashtray. We had no idea of permanence, anything could be disappeared in a flaming sink, and why she stepped down the stairs while the smoke stuttered up we’ll never know. Of all the horoscopes one might consult for the new year, none pinches the top of your arm and maybe that’s wrong. My grandmother boiled everything past recognition. We are still waiting for a burner to finally ignite. Mary Biddinger

“Of the seven present that night—fashioning aimless / mixed drinks with cherry brandy and Sprite, attempting blackjack // with little understanding of rules—only five made it to thirty.” —Mary Biddinger (@marybid.bsky.social),”Dishes of the Afterlife” @blacklawrence.bsky.social

Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 17 — Green Linden Press

“recounting the ways / and times my father // almost died: cave-in, / boot-camp grenade, the dealer’s // two-hundred dollar bounty / for the head of Lawyer Black.” —Rebecca Black, “The Mansion at Elmodel” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-rebe...

SIXTH GRADE. The afternoon the neighborhood boys tied me and Mary Lou Mather to Donny Ralph’s father’s garage doors, spread-eagled, it was the summer they chased us almost every day. Careening across the lawns they’d mowed for money, on bikes they threw down, they’d catch us, lie on top of us, then get up and walk away. That afternoon Donny’s mother wasn’t home. His nine sisters and brothers gone—even Gramps, who lived with them, gone somewhere—the backyard empty, the big house quiet. A gang of boys. They pulled the heavy garage doors down, and tied us to them with clothesline, and Donny got the deer’s leg severed from the buck his dad had killed the year before, dried up and still fur-covered, and sort of

poked it at us, dancing around the blacktop in his sneakers, laughing. Then somebody took it from Donny and did it. And then somebody else, and somebody after him. Then Donny pulled up Mary Lou’s dress and held it up, and she began to cry, and I became a boy again, and shouted Stop, and they wouldn’t. Then a girl-boy, calling out to Charlie, my best friend’s brother, who wouldn’t look Charlie! to my brother’s friend who knew me Stop them. And he wouldn’t. And then more softly, and looking directly at him, I said, Charlie. And he said Stop. And they said What? And he said Stop it. And they did, quickly untying the ropes, weirdly quiet, Mary Lou still weeping. And Charlie? Already gone. Marie Howe

“They pulled the heavy garage doors down, / and tied us to them with clothesline, / and Donny got the deer’s leg severed from the buck his dad had killed // the year before” —Marie Howe, “Sixth Grade”

Rice pudding! No more comforting food, at least for me.

“their stories, too, largely remain / untold, their skulls most likely full, / he says—like prehistoric black boxes— / of high-pitched, indecipherable screams.” —Stephen Dunn, “Reconstruction” www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

ANOTHER DINNER PARTY. With a head full of smoke, nothing fills me up. Pears, persimmons, ice, crossing my legs on the kitchen counter. Maybe I need a woman, a motherless dandelion to rub emptiness with me. In the perpetual dinner party of my brain the guests are tired. They want to go home. I’m hooking them at the door with my remembers, flirting with the hostages at my all-hours discothèque: One kneeling before a toilet in a bathroom full of SSRIs. One kissing her dying father and one ignoring his call. One spread out and reading Nietzsche amid styrofoam takeout containers.

One licking a mushroom with Dan or Ben or Tom. One arching on the Persian carpet. One tattooing a kite to her ribs. One sliding a fishnetted knee between another’s stockinged legs. Girls, sad and high, we never know who is big or bad or wolf until he’s loved or left or made a meal of us. Tired of being devoured, I make a model of my sorrow, and kiss it. I’ve been waiting on my misery like a man who won’t come. I used to live on crumbs wanting to be touched in the house where no one keeps me. Jessica Abughattas

“One kneeling before a toilet / in a bathroom full of SSRIs. / One kissing her dying father / and one ignoring his call. / One spread out and reading Nietzsche / amid styrofoam takeout containers. / One licking a mushroom / with Dan” —Jessica Abughattas, “Another Dinner Party” @uarkpress.bsky.social

ERASING STARS. A teacher of standing, a poet, tells her class, Never put stars in your poems, and some of the students write this down. And some stop writing after a year or two. And some get married or take jobs selling pharmaceuticals. And some think Time is in short supply, and ex cathedra take up parent worship. I know a Baltic poet who draws Egyptian star charts on cocktail napkins as he answers questions. I also know a poet in Tucson, an amateur ornithologist who believes that stars influence birds. “Of course,” he says, “the carbon in our brains comes from stars.” Erase stars from a page. Nothing happens. The allotropic pulse of mathematics ticks anyway. But now try putting the stars back in. It can’t be done. This failure has nothing to do with personal habits. Stephen Kuusisto

“A teacher of standing, a poet, tells her class, Never put stars in your poems, and some of the students write this down. And some stop writing after a year or two. And some get married or take jobs selling pharmaceuticals.” —Stephen Kuusisto, “Erasing Stars” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

INSOMNIA SONG. Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. Berryman. Life, friends, is terrifying. we must not say so. Yet here I am, & I’m not the only one. Some people like a pink cloud to float themselves & their friends past a velvet cord & into an exclusive club with no windows. I like to see a woman lurching down a trash-filled sidewalk, chugging an airline bottle of vodka & tossing it at my feet. I like a person who sees clearly, & can’t handle it, who wants a thunder shirt like the ones that calm dogs, just to get through the day. Some people hear the songs of redwoods, & transcribe

them in motivational lyrics employing faulty grammar & banal phraseology. My people lie awake at night, waiting for a giant, shallow-rooted tree or a hunk of space debris to fall on them, ruminating on subduction & sonic attacks. Black thought-balloons bumping along the ceiling, decanting microbial demons that lean down & carefully insert needles of dread along our meridians. Our hearts decelerating to a dirge no one wants to hear because my people are a drag, like this poem. You should stop reading now. Go tear off someone’s petals & fall upon the memory foam of life, instead of lying there

like a fossil entombed in a rock, wondering how much time is left as you listen to the faraway sounds of migratory birds falling dead into arroyos—thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump—a spiny lobster scraping its way over bleached brain coral. Go be happy: thump, thump, thump. I prefer to stay here, saying many pointless things to no one, & in that way go on not killing myself or anyone else, like an ugly flower in an impenetrable forest, where no prince will come along to ruin everything. Kim Addonizio

“Some people hear the songs of redwoods, & transcribe them in motivational lyrics / employing faulty grammar & banal phraseology... // My people lie awake at night, waiting for a giant, shallow-rooted tree / or a hunk of space debris to fall on them” —Kim Addonizio, “Insomnia Song”

“my father,/sitting by his bedside,/making notes in the margins/of my book./At the back of the cancer ward,/the private elevator/was large enough for a gurney./I imagined it went right down/a dark throat/to a basement.” — @kevinprufer.bsky.social poems.com/poem/a-dog-b...

FOR THOSE WHO MISS THE IMPORTANT PARTS. The year Truman fired MacArthur my uncle returned from the hospital at Decatur, his left hand torn from the wrist, milled into a ghostly bin of Martha White Self-Rising Flour. While Oscar Garrett ranted, “We ought to get the bastards before they get the bomb,” and his wife, Mildred, went to the kitchen for more custard, the blue stump slipped out of its flannel sleeve, puffy and knuckled like the head of a cottonmouth. I didn’t know pain had a phantom, a thorn, like frostbite, that ran long and clean to the bone of emptiness. I don’t know yet whether the coal stove or shame flushed my father’s face

with roses. While important history went on elsewhere, while the tough March wind punched the window frames and kicked at the glass bulb in the heel of the thermometer, my father and uncle were almost as old as I am now. Now I wish I were Li Po with a Yangtze and plum blossom to praise, with a poem hard as jade to lay on the threshold of annihilation. If MacArthur had marched into China, the map would still be yellow, or I would not remember so much my uncle’s good hand cold on my brow, and how my eyes fell then, out of shyness, running along the floorboards, passing over his brown shoes, over the knots with their difficult wings. Rodney Jones

“The year Truman fired MacArthur / my uncle returned / from the hospital at Decatur, / his left hand torn / from the wrist, milled / into a ghostly bin / of Martha White Self-Rising Flour” —Rodney Jones, “For Those Who Miss the Important Parts”

A CRASH OF RHINOS. What’s your pet name? Collective noun? What will Snookums do today? Your bedmate pulls quarters magically from behind your ear, one for each hour you’ve spent together. When he stops there’s fifty cents sliding into the sheets and his tongue covering the pink cauliflower of your nipple. “Beautiful defects,” he whispers into your body. “Ah, Nature.” Roll away, don’t care when he calls you “Thumper.” By noon you’ll be nose to nose anyway, a sloth of bears, snoozing your way into this relationship. Ah, Nature. You could tell him its startling fact is not its defects but its sameness. A uniformity suggestive of some single-cell prototype, our Adam/Eve genome plucked, as scientists think, from the thread of a lightning bolt. Darling, today you’re more than anonymous, one sexy blip among the thousand couples grunting in each other’s arms; defined by Loving, your action. Flying geese only recognized by the form they make in the sky. A crash of rhinos, piece of asses.

Stinkhead: everything comes in boring droves of hogs. This is how you got here. Mid-morning he tallies your union in terms of snakes, tarantulas, the evolutionary needs of common flagellates till you scorn science: its primal urge to pair like scared cows shoved ass to ass in circles for defense. A dutch of penises! What is love but fear? That soft storm at your periphery, sudden hand pushing you below surface? Thoughts, as you age or sicken, sifted from consciousness like dusts of starlings: Love me, little lamb. No one should die alone. Sweetheart, all your friends are married. Packs of teazles? Kerfs of panters? A multiplicity of spouses. Today only two quarters protect you from loneliness. It’s out of your hands. The job didn’t pan, checks bounce, 2 A.M. is its own worst child. This is your last magic trick. “Kumquat,” he whispers. Lover. Loved one. And the soul begs always, Leave me leave me while the body says simply, Stay. Paisley Rekdal

“Sweetheart, all your friends are married. / Packs of teazles? Kerfs of panters? A multiplicity of spouses.” — @paisleyrekdal.bsky.social, “A Crash of Rhinos” @ugapress.bsky.social

“I check the Bible to see what Jesus / is saying about me. The answer is always nothing, // aside from the time he lambasted the outfit I wore / to the People's Choice Awards” —Jason Bredle, “The Idiot's Guide to Faking Your Own Death and Moving to Mexico” www.versedaily.org/2006/fakingd...

“the eyes of his cold blond unbodied murderous women, beating very slowly, like the hearts of hibernating crocodiles; of his chaises longues, with their malicious pillows” —Margaret Atwood, “In Love with Raymond Chandler” (via @carlasarett.bsky.social) writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3F...

Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 17 — Green Linden Press

“Alas, / I wandered lonely as a middle class / and out loud, too. I pour the ahem / de menthe like a quickening, / pleasant wrench into the center / of your attention.” —Marc McKee, “Ahem de Menthe” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-marc...

YOU & THE BANKER. He was twice divorced, a history buff, and fond, he said eyeing the skinny blonde behind you, of the ethnic type. As you ate each petit course, almost as a filmic joke, you made a note to get falafel from your favorite street vendor on the way home. Instead, you let him take you to an antique shop, up narrow, squeaky stairs, to buy an engraving sliced from a rare book. He needed art for his summer home with the ocean view. You felt sick for wanting that life: ships that could sail so out of context. Or, he said, what about this whale? Rosa Alcalá

“He was twice divorced, a history buff, and fond, he said eyeing the skinny blonde behind you, of the ethnic type.” —Rosa Alcalá, “You & the Banker” @coffeehousepress.bsky.social

EXIT. One morning I woke up and you were gone but I didn’t know it yet. Someone was cutting you down while someone else filmed a video of it that they posted on the internet. I was eating breakfast with my kids. I wasn’t thinking of you. Even then you would have called me stupid, called this poem stupid, called me smelly slut. In the stillness of quarantine, I cut ties with the night. I spent a lot of time thinking of you, turning you around and around, man on a string spinning in a void. Man who chose his own exit, who opened a door and left. On the other side of the door, what? Old junky time. Old eyes in a pile. The friend who went through a year before you, gunshot blanking his face. When you are gone you remind me of my old dead grandfather, lost in the woods, huffing exhaust from a hose.

The meanest and truest thing I said to you was you would kill yourself or someone else. I said it. That was before you threatened to kill me. This is the last poem I’ll write for you, hanging man, spindle drop, dirt clod, moldering specimen, lacing guitar strings together to form a lasso, gathering cocaine into a bouquet to shove into your nose, fucking and angry. Your anger like a fast storm on the bay, coming to get you, then me. A do-si-do into the grave. A false step. A promenade. When you dipped me, I felt bones in my hair. I felt the absence space of death ring my ears. I felt the glowering allure of someone who hates me. Inside me, a wrong woman drawn to the dark, stinking of pussy, naked, flawed-up, big-toothed and screeching, breasts sweaty and flapping. I hate her. I love her.

I pick her up as I put you down, lower, down into your grave. She hoists the first shovel. When I found out you were gone I threw up. I sobbed. I imagined the twitch of your foot, the sharp twang of your neck, the way your fingers stiffened. I imagined night, coming for you with her dark hood, with her cape of galaxies, with her low voice rumbling, Ok, Ok, give me a minute, with her chin full of stubble. I imagined that she lay below your feet, a force to pull and swallow, a way to be still. A stillness. I imagined a stillness. I imagined the night, a single cricket’s trill. A shadow that took you. That held your hand and helped you down. Watch your step. This way. That took you over the bay, so there was stillness. Stillness and the night, humid and bug riddled, but cooling, the dew condensing on the grass below. Stillness, halting your body’s droopy sway. Rebecca Lehmann

“The friend who went through a year before you, / gunshot blanking his face. When you are gone / you remind me of my old dead grandfather, / lost in the woods, huffing exhaust from a hose.” — @rebeccaslehmann.bsky.social, “Exit” @cincinnatireview.bsky.social @upittpress.bsky.social

Kitchen Window Several men were not my father. Some I avoided, some I wanted to impress.

“He saw the wariness one learns from being neglected—eating too fast, being overly grateful, always knowing who was in the house: their motivations, moods, and locations.” —Richard Siken, “Kitchen Window” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social poems.com/poem/kitchen...

GIRL TALK. My mother tells me to be careful about who I hang out with and what I do because “it can all come back and bite you in the ass.” My friends think my mother is “earthy” and “hilarious” and also “poisonous.” Anyway, I’m getting advice from somebody who has been married three times and cries herself to sleep. She makes me never want to have a kid and if somebody just handed me a baby and then hopped into a red convertible with a license plate that said SUPERFUN, I’d go right to the nearest fire station and drop the kid off. But I’d go alone because my mom loves firemen and watches every show on TV that has sirens. If she went along with me to the fire station, the next morning I’d be eating oatmeal and a stranger in a very red helmet would stroll in and sheepishly introduce himself. The other day in the computer lab, I looked up animals that mate for life instead of three-day weekends

in Palm Springs. Here’s what I found: Black vultures, French angelfish, Gibbons, Swans, Wolves, Termites, Beavers, Prairie Voles, Bald eagles, Barn owls. I imagined everything on that list getting together at a Holiday Inn and celebrating their devotedness. They’re all so different there wouldn’t be any jealousy though I can imagine the wolves might want to eat the voles but since the wolf-husband has been married a long time he would know you can’t just do what you want so he’d wait till the buffet was available so as not to ruin the weekend for everybody, even the termites. The other day Mom asked me if I knew about condoms and as a joke I said, “Sure. The best ones taste like strawberry.” And she said, “Oh, my God, honey. Me too.” Then she hugged me. And I couldn’t help it. I hugged her back. Ron Koertge

“My friends think my mother is ‘earthy’ and ‘hilarious’ and also ‘poisonous.’” —Ron Koertge, “Girl Talk” @redhenpress.bsky.social

Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 17 — Green Linden Press

“27 years later, newly sober, his mother’s ashes / dissipated now in an unnamed forest on the Olympic Peninsula, / he no longer remembers the teacher’s name, / only that the name was a landmark.” —Jay Nebel, “The Earth Sciences” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-jay-...

“the laughing owls / that squat in the trees above / your neighborhood // still cackle to themselves nightly, / a synchronized posse / of madwomen // committed to the skeletal pines.” — @erinwriter.bsky.social, “At Last” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social www.versedaily.org/2007/atlast....

THE AIR THERE. We walked past ice skaters, past children falling on purpose. They like the drama of it, Jane was saying. She was staying with friends near the hospital. If the trial goes well, she said, I might move east. It was an experiment, this trying to keep her body from dying. Meanwhile, we headed west through the park to an open house, a ground

floor apartment so doll-like Jane said: if I die, hell better be bigger. At the coffee shop, she got a ginger tea. She apologized to the wall she bumped into. At 95th Street she touched the front door and the elevator button through her blue scarf—a precaution. The air was cold there. We kissed it. Andrea Cohen

“If the trial goes well, she said, / I might move east. It was / an experiment, this trying / to keep her body from dying.” —Andrea Cohen, “The Air There” @fourwaybooks.bsky.social

from The First Black Bachelorette. And yet, Rachel. Rachel, who scratches your dandruff like Tea Cake in chapter eleven in Their Eyes Were Watching God? Who detangles and combs your hair with deep conditioner? Who wraps your hair at night? Has Bryan seen you in your silk bonnet yet? You know it’s real when you're riding on top with your hair wrapped. It takes a lot of money to look this trashy, Dolly Parton says. LaLa says she was never ugly, just poor. I want my teeth fixed and chiseled but veneers are so expensive. I hide my coffee-stained crooked things. Cardi B raps, Got a bag and fixed my teeth. Hope you hoes know it ain’t cheap. So I try to hide the unevenness in my teeth

when I talk, which means, sometimes, I don’t talk when I can see myself. I try to hide the gaps and how sharp my teeth really are. How animal. How lower-class. How cash-poor my mouth really is. I don’t look pretty when I cum. My mouth, open. My jaw, slack and sideways, pooling spit. My deadened eyes fixed on one object in the room. This time, a chair. This time, a corner, half in shadow. This time, I just wanted to watch a black woman on TV fall in love for entertainment. For escape. The best cure for microagressions is shitty TV, and again, Cardi B. Tiana Clark

“Has Bryan seen you / in your silk bonnet yet? You know / it’s real when you’re riding on top / with your hair wrapped. It takes a lot / of money to look this trashy, Dolly Parton / says.” —Tiana Clark, “The First Black Bachelorette” @kenyonreview.bsky.social

“Did you know that Galileo was a Mason? Okay, he wasn’t, / but that didn’t stop the Masons from digging up his body / a century after his death, performing a secret ritual known / only to members of that fraternity” —David Kirby, “Galileo” @lsupress.bsky.social inside.ewu.edu/willowspring...

[Overheard at White Castle]: “That shit at the funeral was bad.” [Pause] “Was it lack of oxygen?” [Pause] “Do you think she was awake when it happened? Do you think she came out of it, and then… BAM!?” [Very Long Pause] “Yeah, so… I mean, I could give her what she needs… but to smoke?”

SMALL CRAFT TALK. In some languages the word for dream is the same as for music is the kind of thing poets like to say to prove they’re on your side, but no one is on your side forever, not even a poet, although a poem can be, if it’s able to disarm you enough to submit to its peculiar logic, as if you’re hearing the song of your own mind sung into being so that you become yourself

by becoming more like another self, like the friendly bank teller who became the bank’s greatest thief. he gave away his entire plunder to neighborhood children, so the judge who sentenced him to life couldn’t look the jury in the eyes as he retreated to his chambers to fold his black robe over his chair and sign his final decision. I’ve always wished life were different, which he left on his desk beneath a coin before climbing through the window and turning back into an owl. Dobby Gibson

“In some languages the word for dream / is the same as for music // is the kind of thing poets like to say / to prove they’re on your side” —
@dobbygibson.bsky.social @parisreview.bsky.social @graywolfpress.bsky.social

Jim Daniels The Glacier Issue TwoWinter 2023 MEETING THE BLIND BORGES Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone. Jimi Hendrix Borges The original is unfaithfu…

“I am riding with blind Borges in his sophisticated air-car thinking about Hilda who never married and was built to play nose tackle, who taught me a thing or three about Borges and Lorca and Lope de Vega whose name made me giddy” —Jim Daniels theglacierjournal.com/issue-two/ji...