May is always a crazy month for me, even though it seems like such a mild one according to what most writers would tell you. Summer is almost here, but there are so many birthdays going on, including mine (I read somewhere that my birthday, May 22nd, is the rarest birthday to have?). A few of my friends are coming down to South Florida for the occasion (and their own birthdays), and I haven’t seen them in the longest time. I really don’t know what to think about 25. I thought I was still 18?

I’m reading Adrienne Rich’s poetry collection, The Dream of a Common Language. Despite the fact that she passed away just this year, it was fairly difficult to find a copy of this book online. Rich was a poet I greatly admired while I was an undergrad, and I still do. I feel some kind of kinship with her and I’m not sure why that is. I’m still trying to figure that out. She’s also one of the few poets who actually writes tolerable love poems. That’s really difficult to achieve at this point, I think. I love how her poems read like stories and aren’t these entirely inscrutable, abstract puzzles within meta-enigmas, and how they’re concrete, visceral, and so immediately emotionally charged. They’re like sudden jolts of electricity.

In other news, I’ve sent quite a few stories and poems out to various publications. I’m still waiting to hear back from most of them. Unfortunately, I did not win the Indiana Review’s annual poetry prize. Haha. Maybe I’m better at writing short fiction. I still can’t really tell.