Harper Lee is penning a new great American novel
and all I can manage each day is scooping peanut butter
into grapefruit halves because we’re out of clean bowls
& write poems about how writing poems about
the people you love sucks
when everything you submit to lit magazines
only lets them down.
Harper Lee has Scout and Scout has her father
but sometimes all I have
is the man who once counted the knots in my hair
like an abacus and said he’d rather leave my poems
than my bed.
by Meggie Royer