Status Updates From Set Me On Fire: A Poem For ...

Origin Story
-Eve L. Ewing-

This is true:
my mother and my father
met at the Greyhound bus station
in the mid-eighties in Chicago.
my mother, all thick glass and afro puff,
came west on the train when she was nineteen,
lived in a friend’s house and cared for her children,
played tambourine in a Chaka Khan cover band.
my father, all sleeveless and soft eye,
ran away from home when he was seventeen,

The Great Lover
–Rupert Brooke–

I have been so great a lover: filled my days
So proudly with the splendour of Love’s praise,
The pain, the calm, and the astonishment,
Desire, illimitable, and still content,
And all dear names men use, to cheat despair,
For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear
Our hearts at random down the dark of life.
Now, ere the unthinking silence on that strife
Steals down, I