I was holding a coffee mug, a clean one with this is what a published author looks like emblazoned in black across pure white porcelain. I was headed to put it on the shelf above the beer fridge and the Keurig. I stopped and said, “Alex who?”

Earlier that same day, I'd texted a friend in Oxford, Mississippi, about Frank Stanford’s 15,283-line poem, “The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You.” I was on the hunt for an epigraph and woefully unaware of the ice storm that had devastated Lafayette County.

“It sounded like bombs going off, man.” That’s what my friend said later when I called. “All these giant oaks falling, snapping power lines and crushing people’s houses.”

My friend hasn’t had power for over a week. He and his family have been staying with a neighbor, hunkered down around a wood-burning stove.

“This is one of the few times,” my friend said, “that I wish my buddies weren’t all writers and hippie musicians.”

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The pen may be mightier than the sword, but when your power is out a generator sure comes in handy. When there are trees on your roof and the National Guard is preoccupied, a chainsaw beats the heck out of a sonnet. After all that’s happened already, what’s left to say?

don’t blame me

i didn’t vote for him

That’s what the bumper sticker said, the one on the back of the jacked-up Dodge Ram pulled over on West Main, trying to help free a Hyundai from the snow. I was hunting up sledding hills instead of epigraphs when I spotted it. My kids were with me. Maybe that’s why I didn’t stop my four-wheel-drive Ford. Or maybe it was that bumper sticker.

I stopped checking my social media, quit watching the news, a little over a year ago. I wanted to see people, my people — the guys I’d gone to school with, the adults who’d helped raise me — without being aware of their latest Facebook posts. I wanted to try and love them, but blind love comes at a cost.

The truth is that my life, my day-to-day existence, hasn’t changed much over the last year. There is no one knocking at my door, no deadly protests in the streets of my hometown. My office is warm. My water is clean. The oaks outside my window are still standing.

all of this is magic

against death

That’s the Frank Stanford line I was looking for that led me to call my buddy in Oxford. When we spoke, all I could offer him were my words, my thoughts and prayers, my deepest condolences.

Since then, I’ve considered driving to Mississippi and lending a hand, or marching alongside anti ICE protesters in Minneapolis.

But what about my wife? My kids? What sort of example am I setting? What sort of example could I set, if I wasn’t here with them?

all of this ends

with to be continued

That’s the next two lines in the Stanford poem that started me down this slippery slope, but they’re not the last.

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