My left hand is cold, my right hand colder,
and I wonder how long can I lean on this fence watching
it snow?

The rain is clearing, but the sun has just set. The sea breaks on the rocks. Philippa scrolls through her Instagram, comparing her thighs to those of the girls she'd gone to school with and not really liked.

I don’t think much about memories I have that are in Mandarin, though I wonder sometimes if that’s because I have a complicated relationship with one language while living in a country that privileges another.

I’d like to give you those things as well, because
giving is evidence of friendship
and friendship is evidence of love.
Like the moon is evidence of gravity.

He looks around the barn—and he can see it now. The bare boards, the stables, the loft.

Over to one side, the wheelbarrow is standing.

But his friend is nowhere around.

We writers have our work, just as others have their work, and we must do it. And let us not forget: people write because they need to write, because there is something that obsesses them that will not go away until they write about it. To ignore that need is to court who knows what psychological danger.

Sometimes I wish I could
peel myself from myself
without discarding the shell.

What is Akbar’s pilgrim searching for? Sobriety? Solace? Something that rewards precise wording, like a prayer or poem? Or something beyond speech? Poem by poem, the answer varies, and at times what he’s seeking matters less than how he’s asking for it.

Her poem being workshopped is—I had told her to rethink trees—about a tree. The poem is dedicated to Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin and describes an anonymous tree with a broken branch. Someone’s nicked their names into the bark. One student—classically handsome, tall, lean Black kid, writes sort of impenetrable jewel-like poems with beautiful turns of phrase and always breezes into the room with a classmate, laughing—breaks the silence. “I don’t think Trayvon would want to be turned into a tree.”