She sleeps with your ghost at night in bed

The end of an era arrived in my mailbox on Saturday.

I began to write poems in the winter of 2000. I credit T.S. Eliot—a friend of mine had given me Inventions of the March Hare (1997), a collection of trial runs at famous pieces and juvenilia from Eliot's own college years. Some of it is flawed and fascinating. Much of it is appalling dreck. I was a sophomore at Brandeis; with the exception of one poem for my grandmother's death in 1997, I had written nothing in verse since elementary school and every now and then I offer a covert prayer that none of those pages survive in a filing cabinet or an overstuffed drawer somewhere in my parents' house, because in elementary school I was not a precocious bard, I was writing sprawling, painfully scrawled pencil-columns with titles like "Moon Dragon" and "Corridors of the Sea," which I did not then know I was stealing from Eliot. Eight years later I was reading Tacitus and Plato and working up my final routine for Peter Gould's "Physical Comedy and Clowning" in a bathroom half an hour before class and I wrote a poem called "Hallows." December 7th on a tangerine-colored clamshell Mac, in my tiny, badly soundproofed rectangle of a single on the sixth floor of East Quad. It was the only poem I wrote that year. In 2001 there were sixteen. As far as I can tell, my brain looked at the contrast of Eliot's more promising and more embarrassing attempts and said to itself, without bothering to inform me in so many words, You know, Eliot sucked in college and he turned out famous: I can work with this.

I actually sold "Hallows" almost exactly a month later, although it wouldn't see print until the spring of 2002. It's very clear that I had just discovered Seamus Heaney when I wrote it—I can tell that I did write it, but it no longer feels quite like me. On February 27, 2001, I put two manuscripts in the mail. One was a story that would rack up fifteen rejections, one withdrawal, and one sudden demise of market before finally finding a home with Christopher Rowe and Gwenda Bond's Say . . . have you heard this one? three years and two revisions later. The other was the first poem that I know is mine.

I don't remember what I did next. Had some poems rejected. Submitted another story. It was the spring semester, so I was reading the Metamorphoses in Latin class and the legal speeches of Lysias for Greek and somewhere around that time I wrote a paper on the lararia of Pompeii, the ultimately unsuccessful bargains that people in a city flattened by earthquake make with their gods to keep it from happening again. On March 10, having enclosed a self-addressed stamped envelope as instructed by the guidelines, I received it back in the mail; I opened it as I was walking up from Usdan Student Center toward North Quad, or more likely Rabb steps—I wouldn't live in North until the next year, when strange_selkie would mistake me for a ghost in the pipes. It did not contain my manuscript and a rejection. Mythic Delirium had accepted my poem "Turn of the Century, Jack-in-the-Green" for publication in their next issue, Summer/Fall 2001. It was the fourth poem I had written since I started. It was my second acceptance. It would be my first published poem.

It would make a better story if I could remember where I first heard of the magazine, but I can't. Ralan.com is the likeliest suspect. I know I did my research: before submitting work, I had ordered a copy of the latest issue, #4, Winter/Spring 2001. I can still remember the illustrations and several of the poems, especially Laurel Winter's "The Apple in Her Dreams," Jack Fisher and Wendy Rathbone's "Back to October," and Ann K. Schwader's "Coughing Up." I liked the title and the philosophy; I knew already that most of what I was writing was myth-derived. I signed the contract and put it back in the mail the next day. That packet almost certainly still exists somewhere in a box, in the pile of writing-related manila envelopes with a Boris Vallejo calendar page on top so that I would have something to look at besides my own handwriting when I opened the drawer (note: I really didn't expect Googling "boris vallejo butterfly dragon" to work); I just don't know if it's still in Lexington or upstairs in the Mystery Shack. What I can see if I glance directly right from my desk is that first copy of Mythic Delirium #5, filed carefully on the shelf of contributor's copies I've been keeping since August 26, 2001, when Not One of Us #26 became the first. Poem followed story within a month. I've been doing this for nearly thirteen years. Everything else that's happened in my life since then, I haven't stopped.

Saturday night, right before we dashed out the door to eat something before heading to the Somerville for A Thousand Clowns (1965), which was incidentally amazing, I took the mail from Rob and found three contributor's copies of Mythic Delirium #30, the final print issue of the poetry magazine that found me in the wilds of the internet all those years ago. It's a retrospective, assembled from the first twenty-four issues and fourteen years. I have two contributions, both from those years in college when I can't imagine how I ever slept. "Sedna" was the second poem I wrote after "Hallows," in May 2001 when I was probably procrastinating from my final paper on Roman daily life. (I never sold the third poem. It was a sestina. Eliot, it sucked.) "Kaddish for a Dybbuk" dates from September 2002, the season I was writing about here. I was honored to be asked for their inclusion; it feels strange and plangent that they appear alongside one of the poems I remember from that first issue I read, trying to figure out how this whole poetry racket even worked.

I'm not at Brandeis anymore. I'm not at Yale. I don't live in my parents' house, all my life packed away in depression and chronic pain. I have an apartment with my husband and my lover lives with their wife thirty minutes' walk away and most people I know are artists of one sort or another and nearly all of them need a better job. Most of the magazines I publish with now are online, not photocopied and stapled, collated by hand—or even in color, micropress though they may have been. Not One of Us has lasted long enough to produce a best-of and a fiftieth issue. Mythic Delirium is digital and publishes fiction, too. There's no moral except time, which isn't much of a surprise unless you're expecting a stop. There's just memories and the way things change shape and go on.

Change shape and go on.