Lunch At the Nest

Foodstuffs:

For Lea: grilled cheese (do this and thank me later: sprinkle some cheese on the exterior, too, to create a crunchy cheesy crust), orange juice with sparkling water, and grapes.

For me: last night's leftover Joe's Special (is this something that everyone makes? or is this strictly a San Franicisco thing? I am too lazy to Google) over rice with a side of Lay's thick-cut sea salt potato chips, and Diet Coke over ice.

Happiness.

Post-lunch activities:

Lea: cutting out tin foil stars and gluing them to black construction paper. She thinks this will function as a "night light" in her room. When she says "room," it still sounds like "womb," which strikes me as not only accurate, but also sad. Because by this time next year, she will no longer be talking like this.

Me: thinking on the very kind e-mail received from Craig Perez of Achiote Press. He wrote to thank me for attending the recent reading, and then said he'd found his way to Nesting Ground and deduced that I'm a writer of sorts, and would I consider submitting to Achiote Seeds? And I said, oh pity I am but a lowly fiction writer, but if you ever do a poetry/fiction mash-up, I will be first in line to submit. And then, as a sort of see-what-I-mean, I closed my e-mail with a little thing I do sometimes, this little thing being taking a line of poetry and using it as a springboard for a fiction vignette. And then Craig wrote back to say, hey, I really liked that, would you contribute a bunch of those for the Winter '07 issue? And I said, hey, sounds like fun, but let's make it tentative in case you don't like what I send you, I'd hate to box you in, etc. etc. So this is where we stand now. But suddenly I'm thinking what if poets don't like that I do this? It's one thing to do it in the privacy of my own writing practice, but another to do it in the public space of a journal even if their line would, but of course, be celebrated as theirs.

So I began to wonder why I started doing this sort of thing in the first place, and I realized it was because prior to starting my blog and being so warmly welcomed by a group of poets, I hadn't read much poetry. The reason: I am actually quite a lazy reader. By this I mean that if I cannot locate a fairly obvious personal access point to printed matter, I will not read it.

[pause to make a pot of adobo]

But, funny thing, once I began to inhabit a virtual world filled with such nice and lovely poets, I was no longer willing to give up so easily. And, I have to admit, it's tough going at times. So this whole thing that I do—this taking of one line—somehow helps me find my way into a poem when I otherwise cannot. So sometimes it is that. But sometimes it is just that I like to see what effect the poet's word choice—because they are so precise, the poets, aren't they? they are x-acto blades; I am butter knife—will have on my own.

So, anyways, I think I will definitely move ahead with this project for Achiote Seeds. Which means I'll be e-mailing poets to ask their permission.

Feeling sheepish 'bout that.