So I’m in my 4th semester at Drew, and I just turned in the very first, very rough draft of my manuscript. But I need more poems, more and more, so I’m trying Poem a Day again. When I made myself write something every day of April the results were awesome, and out of those I got at least six or seven really great pieces.

So here goes again. With work, school, and the High Holidays I’m not vowing they’ll be a poem each day, but I’m going to try.

Ina’s Vow

Admittedly, she was drunk at the time
but not as drunk as he was, drunk and deep into his
most familiar litany

No. Just no. It just ain’t natural. It just ain’t right. No woman
can handle going down. She just couldn’t.

but a drunken vow is still a vow and anyway
she’d been rebelling against her uncle’s Rules for Girls
since she first could clasp an axe.

So she made a list of 1000 questions and began to hunt answers
as she hunted quail, flushing out the game and bagging
everything in reach.

She asked every woman she met and every man who would talk to her to
to tell her everything about the mines. She took meticulous notes.

No one bothered to ask about the scribbling for Ina
had always been a queer child, too headstrong for a girl.