In the kind of country I imagine we will be in the next four years, this woman will be our national poet:

The dream’s forfeit was a night in jail

and now the slant light is crepuscular.

Papers or not, you are a foreigner

whose name is always difficult to spell.

You pack your one valise. You ring the bell.

Might it not be prudent to disappear

beneath that mauve-blue sky above the square

fronting your cosmopolitan hotel?

You know two short-cuts to the train station

which could get you there, on foot, in time.

The person who’s apprised of your intention

and seems to be your traveling companion

is merely the detritus of a dream.

You cross the lobby and go out alone.

From this.

She writes like my dream of writing.

A.