My editor called to tell me he’d finished the first pass.
The relief reverberated through the phone. 
Like the instant he realized he would never see it again.

“I marked it up”
“I sent comments”
“Let me know if it helps “

 He took six months and every time I thought about it,
how the title changed a dozen times,
and the filler poems I included,
all part of another idea that got soaked up in the book
then squeezed out like wringing a dish towel,
its blue forget-me-not pattern stained purple by words
I’d strung together and hung on the front porch at Christmas.

“Thanks for reading”
“I can’t wait”
“What did you think”

And the screen had no more texts.
no blinking dot marks that he was typing, 
and I knew, I just knew,
the next draft would be completely different.