Asakiyume mita

A package from Copper Canyon Press came for me. I imagined two improbable scenarios.

(1) I had somehow sent something to them, then forgotten about it, and now they were publishing it--or no: someone else had, and now I was getting a copy of the collection or whatever that it was in.

(2) Someone had bought me a present.

It was neither of those. Inside the package was a magazine-seeming thing, and an envelope with a note: "Thank you so much for your kind words about Night Sky with Exit Wounds [poetry collection by Ocean Vuong]. LIke you, I was blown away by that book ..."

Suddenly I recalled: When I bought that collection (for my poetry unit at the jail), I filled out the card that came with it and sent it back to the publisher. Now in return I had received a really sweet note from an intern there.

The magazine-thing turned out to be a catalogue of the press's recent offerings. I opened at random to a page advertising Alison C. Rollins's debut collection, titled Library of Small Catastrophes. It's a great title, isn't it?

The catalogue included this, from that collection:

Excerpt from "Skinning Ghosts Alive," by Alison C. Rollins

Even a snake loses itself in its skin.
Its life's throat peeled back in molting song.

A second me lies somewhere on the ground.
Hollowed as the cicada shells I collected in the woods

as a child. Knowing then that the anatomy of loss
was worth picking, if only to acknowledge that

something has shed and not died, something brown as me
has left its skeleton behind, more intact than broken,

as if to say we are living and dying just the same.

This is why we are so homesick,
why we hull ourselves in shadows.

I might order this collection!