I woke up this morning to learn that I've got a poem up at Vox Populi: "The Unicorn Is in Captivity and No Longer Dead." This is a piece that arose from one of the communal writing prompts at my Thursday-night salon. Now I can't recall exactly what the prompt was, but I do know that it forced me to push together a number of unlike things, and, voila, the unicorn story surfaced.

It's a treat to wake up on a workaday Monday and remember that once I wrote poems. I've got a lot of things to get done today, and few of them concern poetry. Instead, I need to do housework and get the groceries in and finish editing a chapter and otherwise prep myself for heading north tomorrow afternoon. It's going to take some time for me to get back into the swing of these northern trips. Plus, shed construction is not conducive to weekend housework, though I did get the bathrooms cleaned and the air conditioner stowed and various harvest things accomplished. Ergo, here I am, on messy Monday, trying to snatch together all of the frayed ends.

On the bright side, two weeks out from Covid, I am feeling pretty good. Brain fog has lifted, energy is back, sinuses are recovering, and I am basically a regular person again. And on Wednesday I'll be back in the classroom, with a new batch of kids and a mandate to do whatever I want. We'll be looking at poems by Dorianne Laux and Vera Pavlova, we'll be talking about what the students want to learn, we'll be discovering how a studio classroom differs from an academic one, we'll be figuring out how to trust and leap. It will be thrilling.