“Because before that I wasn’t thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever.”

I wanted to be like Spock because he was unflappable.

I never thought I would type that I learned how to emote in poems from watching Star Trek but there it is.

Bones was a grouch but he was sympathetic. The show worked like a boy band in that way… it had characters who embodied different psychic or emotional positions and that allowed me to see a great range of things

That was one of things that surprised me so much when I was writing the poems.

I had to find a way to be more honest about what happened. And it wasn’t fun to write, even though the poems aren’t 100% autobiographical.

They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.

By that I mean, honest and not trying to amplify some mythological version of myself.

I mean getting people to think about what language actually means before they use it is a good thing.

There is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back.

I wanted to be like Kirk because he had magnetism and the ladies loved him.

But it’s become very clear the past nine years that some Americans truly resent thinking before they speak.

It will alter the way you hear poetry forever. And not in a good way.

This poem began as an emulation of Siqueiros’s compositional style and, in the process, became an ekphrastic aubade about my old neighborhood.

So while I loved not being hungry and having new gear, etc. I missed the sounds of my neighbors and the kind of generosity people who are struggling together often show.

Echo of a Scream (1937).’ I got spun out by the way he creates tension and movement through the interlocking details in the painting.

Bigotry doesn’t care about state or regional lines. It’s all over the place.

Health – what my friends are always drinking to before they fall down.

Believe me, sir, never a night goes by, be I ever so tired, but I read the Word of God before I go to bed.

If you cross the Atlantic with an American lady you invariably fall in love with her before the journey is over.

Every man worships the dollar, and is down before his shrine from morning to night… Other men, the world over, worship regularly at the shrine with matins and vespers, nones and complines, and whatever other daily services may be known to the religious houses; but the New Yorker is always on his knees.

One that has never previously been seen before our time, in any age since the beginning of the world.

Before even Court Grip, I just wanted to be a part of a brand that I felt that listened to the athlete and really catered to the athlete, and gave us what we were looking for.

My favorite thing before going to school was watching ‘Full House,’ ‘Sabrina the Teenage Witch,’ and ‘Boy Meets World.’

Before I became the ‘Great Test of the West,” I was the ‘Beast of the East.’