The direction is always push. Just the past few years, I’ve been called an emerging poet, an older poet, a new poet, an insider, an outsider, a dark horse, a poet-lawyer. I am all of it & none of it & it is a privilege either way. 

This fellowship is a kind of mercy granted to me: to the lawyer-who-writes-poems me, to the dust of me who crawled out from a 12-year poetry drought, to the bartender/feral poet me of the mid-90s who was patched together with bourbon, cash tips, hair dye, & salt. Back when my stacked ones & fives never laid flat. 

My manuscript-in-progress, Precariat, reckons with the decade during which I worked full-time in restaurants. I did not have health care. I lived from shift to shift, did not have savings. I worked late into the night and walked alone to my car with cash in my pockets. Somehow, I kept myself alive.

It's true I’m a lawyer now. I represent people in challenges I struggled with myself, or might’ve. I represent people who must rely on others’ kindness or forgiveness, on their own hustle. And while I am a lawyer, I’m a poverty lawyer. My law school debt remains a mortgage on my brain. I am constantly reminded that my life of precarity is perched waiting for me, one paycheck away.
 
If there is one feeling I work to keep in my lungs, it is gratitude, the breadth of which has deepened & radicalized every year I’m lucky to be alive. And now & yet again, gratitude—for this fellowship, for the company of my fellow artists, for the safety it affords me to become wilded by the new work I’m making—& I hope to offer it back through the grace that poems conjure in me, for however long they continue. Poems are my penance for being excruciatingly alive in this world. 

Thank you to the National Endowment for the Arts, the fellowship committee, & the communities of artists who survive themselves in the perilous direction of push.