that I’ve been thinking about a way to write this letter to respond to this time to salvage some semblance of what’s lost what’s lyrical that my student comes to me and says i want to do the work but someone was shot on my street just last night and right now gertrude stein is just plain stupid that she says it and she means it that i am at a loss for words that in another class i tell my students that as writers we are conscious of the world and our words of what is beneath that brick of a poem that even as it is being hurled through a window the glass shattering the child crying the mother sweeping shards into a neat pile of fragments that when lifting up the brick to discard it from memory that she finds meaning hidden on the one side laid flat pressed to the floor that as an adult I saw myself as the boy on the outside unwrapping this brick from a black wool scarf that I was the one who threw it through a window that I can still feel my heart beat in that moment in the past running laughing thinking that I had found pleasure in the breaking of things