1999. I was back in Madtown, watching baseball with my dad and reading a really lousy poem in a literary journal, a pen in my hand. The poem made me think of a friend of mine from grad school because I knew that she would have disliked the poem, too. On the inside front cover of the journal, I started writing a letter to my grad school friend. The letter became a poem, and that poem ended up in my book. Here's the last stanza of the poem. These are probably the only pretty lines in the entire book.

It was dusk, and the sky was turning
pink and purple and orange in the west
and dark blue in the east, dark blue
on its way to black. Stars
were coming out. Some were out
and shining, and some were hidden
behind little bits of cloud.