Who starts a fire just to let it go out?

"I'm like you," my godchild said gravely to me over dinner at Max's, "I don't sleep when I'm supposed to."

In my defense, neither selkie nor I realized we had talked past half past one in the morning.

The hell o'clock train was uneventful. I slept through most of Connecticut and at least dozed through some of Pennsylvania. I think we were still in New Jersey when the tracks ran close to the water so that I could read all the Maersk labels but not the name on the fire-engine-red Hamburg Süd container ship, but we were definitely outside Philadelphia when I spotted an amazing ruined factory stack for "Blumenthal Bros. Chocolate & Cocoa." The woman next to me was reading an e-book of A Tale of Two Cities (1859); I glanced over half-asleep and caught the old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School and knew exactly where in the story she was. I have decided that the grey flannel, red umbrella man who boarded in Boston must have known the woman on the platform at Penn Station who was wearing an olive-green silk boiler suit. We arrived in D.C. just in time to skip the tornado warning, although not the impressive monsoon that hammered the train's windows with rain for about half an hour while the sky turned a sulfurous overcast. I read my ARC of Ruthanna Emrys' Imperfect Commentaries (2019) on the Metro and thought again how much I like, conceptually as well as character-wise, Ron Spector from "The Litany of Earth" and its novel-sequels, because usually when a morally ambiguous government man is Jewish, there's a twinge lurking somewhere, and here he's just morally ambiguous and Jewish and would be a shoo-in for my favorite character except that I really like Aphra Marsh. A dragonfly alighted on my shoulder as I waited on the bench at White Flint and clung there for half an hour, green-bronze and its wings shining. Selkie met me, Rami picked us up, I got to watch my godchild practice figure skating and then we all ate a lot of very good shawarma. (I don't think I had ever had amba before. I believe I described it as mango garum. On shawarma in a pita with pickled turnips, hummus, tahini, and tomato-and-cucumber chopped salad, it goes great.) I gave my godchild the copy of Ursula Vernon's Castle Hangnail (2015) I had brought them. My hosts shared with me the saga of "The Little Table," because they both work at synagogues. And then there was a lot of talking. My plans tomorrow will depend entirely on how much sleep I get tonight. Right now is probably when I'm supposed to be getting it, so I might as well give it a try. I have even been lent the household's weighted blanket and an actual bed.

So far, this trip, so good.

Get me out of here if you can and I won't do anything you wouldn't

My poem "Punic War IV" is now online at Through the Gate. Like the majority of my poems in the last three years, its writing was politically driven. It is even aptly timed for Memorial Day, the way most of this country goes about it.

In pleasant counterweight to the previous two nights, I slept about eight hours with only a slight break around the time the sun came up, after which I burrowed back under the weighted blanket and conked out again. Have some links that aren't mine.

1. Courtesy of moon_custafer, who thoughtfully tagged it for me: the proper bracha for throwing a milkshake at a fascist.

2. Abigail Nussbaum on Israeli Eurovision vs. Netanyahu.

3. I love how much this story does with implication: Nibedita Sen's "Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island."

4. The amusing, educational text that taught Babylonian scribes and teaches us: "At the Cleaners."

5. R.I.P. Judith Kerr. I can't remember if I knew that the same person had written Mog the Forgetful Cat (1970) and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971). I certainly didn't remember her husband was Nigel Kneale.

pameladean, the first time I saw my husband in a show he didn't write himself, it was Theatre@First's The Lady's Not for Burning. Now he's in their production of The Revenger's Tragedy. I'm looking forward so much. I thought you should know.