It's nothing but a sprout, but it's well budded out

Rabbit, rabbit! Happy May Day!

My poems "Ariadne in Queens" and "A Vixen When She Went to School," published last November in The Cascadia Subduction Zone 8.4, are now free to read online with the rest of their issue. The first was written shortly after rewatching The Big Combo (1955), inspired by a comment of asakiyume's and influenced by a fifth-century vase painting; the second is not the story I thought of writing after the Boston Lyric Opera's A Midsummer Night's Dream in 2011, but it is still Hermia/Puck, so I regret nothing.

My elementary school used to sing a version of this song for May Day. I carried it with me for years: We've been wandering all of the night and the best part of the day, and now returning back again, we bring you a branch of May. A branch of May we bring to you, and at your door we stand—it's nothing but a sprout, but it's well budded out by the work of nature's hand. It was incredibly strange in high school to be browsing one of the small independent bookstores that still existed in those days—a very crystally, new-age one, with as much traffic in gems and dreamcatchers as books or CDs—and suddenly hear a version of its refrain woven into the lyrics of Loreena McKennitt's "The Mummers' Dance," but that's the folk tradition. We had solstice carols and a harvest festival, too.

I loved you when you lost your raincoat, I'll love you when you lose your fear

I spent a portion of this afternoon and evening with my niece, who is five and almost-a-half and has just recently heard "Tea for Two" for the first time. She has her own lyrics:

We could have a little bird
And it would sing all of the time
We could have a little horse
And it would live in a stable outside the apartment building
We could have a little fish
And it would live in a rectangular tank
We would feed them all the food
And they would say
How happy we would be!

My mother has lent me her copy of H.F. Heard's A Taste for Honey (1941). At roughly the halfway mark, I can say it is by far the best novel I have ever read about Sherlock Holmes and killer bees.