now my dress smells like rain & all day long: I've beeneager to get back to my book. a novel about a youngcouple making pasta & falling into one another'sskin. an Irish novel, with names of cities that clunkaround in my mouth — cities I'd never heard ofbut now ride my skull like pleasant, individually-wrapped candies, words with strange cactus-likeshapes, words I star: Sligo. Carricklea. I turnthe page. my mind goes: stick, stick, stick,my brain goes hungry for more. today I runthrough the rain in my wooden clogs & pleasureat the sound: thump, thump, thump, the entiregreen world of a street flashing down an opensewer drain. So alive! I think, thenremember what else makes me possible: publiclibraries. cartilage. a good hardcover. a prayerI overhear my cab driver mumble whilepassing by a full school bus. goose bumps I getfrom reading my old journal, one sentence,another: My heart is a skull zone (did I reallywrite that?) — & oh, I am possible again. I ama fragrant, silly self. today, I thankthe worms who eat the dirt whobreak down the soil who makethe lilacs possible and young, foreverpurpling, forever cradled in my palms as I crossBlakemore Avenue and it rains, rains, rains, and Ithink about eating up the alphabet, which hasmade a city into a word into a sound: Sligo,which slides, slinky-like, into my brain,the dear alphabet which has made meinto a woman who will cross the streetand love the lilacs and treasure the strangeturn of the day, the strange turn ofa word, a sentence, a curve and a strokeof black ink that — thank you — brought me here.