1.
Long before, I’d made 
my own youthful indescretions: in opaque
beer bottles smashed against concrete,
in dead-end situationships with ill-suited partners.

2.
Five years ago, I was learning
how to live the austere writing life,
lost in a haze of alcohol and smoke
like so many in my cohort. We strived
together in a distant University town,
finessed the language of academy,
and taught the basics of rhetoric
to students, drunk on youth and the city,
its party-school reputation.

3.
I’d made 
my own youthful indescretions: in opaque
beer bottles smashed against concrete,
in dead-end situationships with ill-suited partners

4.
Drunk
on words and high on hope, for two years
I’d write stories and academic essays alike
on this same Samsung Galaxy, until the loan
money bought a new laptop and much take-out.

5.
We whispered
about our cohort and I persisted, the usual
indescretions. Somehow we survived each other,
made it through (though it felt like balancing
on a spinning barrel over a deep black chasm).

6.
For the first time in years,
I felt seen. The hope was enough
to break my heart, over and over.

7.
Imposter syndrome is a part of me. 
Nothing is enough, and I feel
as though I broke the yardstick
and made comparisons,
not preparations.

8.
I’m not hurt by much anymore,
but I do feel hair-trigger nostalgia
in the everyday: when the air 
tastes like childhood summers at the lake,
or while imagining my old self still living 
inside my body like a Russian nesting doll. 

9.
Writing is still the old comfortable blanket. 
I open myself to you, oh blank page, oh
unseen reader, easier to meet 
than any old friend, any lover.

10. 
I don’t know
what this poem is about. I do know
about institutions and how they fail
and succeed us. I feel survivor’s guilt
for those lost and failed, those turned away
from their craft.

11. 
Is a vocation
promised? Is time ovular,
like a whole egg? Maybe,
in a parabolic arc, we can become
whole again, like Hawking’s teacup
breaking yet unbreaking.