Last night, two months after major surgery, I found myself at White Whale Bookstore in Bloomfield, one of Pittsburgh's 99 neighborhoods. (You can't decipher the local newspapers--which routinely refer to people and events by neighborhood--without keeping a map that looks something like the state of Indiana, divided into counties, in your head.)

Pittsburgh is a literary city as well as a neighborhood city, and the resurgence of the independent bookstore--over a dozen and counting--is one proof of this. Before White Whale expanded into White Whale, it was East End Book Exchange. Before that, it was an organic bakery. Before that, a Curves--a low-impact exercise studio for women. Before that, a hair salon. Before that..I can't remember. But I'm sure there are people in Bloomfield who know all the layers of this storefront's palimpsest.

I came to read at the official launch of Pittsburgh Poetry Review #5, a print journal that came to be in late 2015--and which publishes a fair number of out-of-towners. (I had a poem in Issue #1 too.) Please consider subscribing to Pittsburgh Poetry Review if you love poetry.

Three of the other readers were poets I know fairly well. Another reader reminded me that she'd rescued my forgotten purse from the cafe at Chatham University during a conference last October, running outside in the cold to return it to me. (This too is a very Pittsburgh story.) The other three readers were strangers to me, then. Neighborly strangers...in a crowd of friends and friends-to-be.

It felt like a homecoming.

There's a certain quality of attention in a room in which a live performance is happening--focused and in this case, encouraging, appreciative. Listening is as powerful as speaking. Among other things, I learned the force inherent in the repetition of a simple word, "here," and a new word, "pareidolia" (seeing a human face in an object, such as Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun).

I sold five copies of Under the Kaufmann's Clock, and split the proceeds 60/40 with White Whale--a perfect transaction on Independent Bookstore Day. I bought a book. I congratulated and thanked and laughed and hugged people. And I read this poem from UTKC:

How I Left You

Palming rings
stripped of meanings.

Stuffing a plastic duffle
with anonymous clothes.

Donning a tired gown
trailing useless ties.

Watching the needle strike a vein,

strangers bending to adjust
the oxygen mask to autopilot.

Blinking past recovery,
supine infant in its Magee isolette.

Tell me why I should come back.

Under the Kaufmann's Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh