I am still quite young to poetry. Nevertheless, poetry is my whole life. I received this news in the midst of work towards my MFA thesis, which is to say, in the midst of being very tired and unsure of everything. In the life I have chosen from the ones which are (or were) possible, the end of a period of shelter comes with an alarm. Precarity is never very far. Here at the end of a graduate program, which began not very far from the beginning of an ongoing pandemic, I was hearing those alarms. Like what was I supposed to do about the future. What was I supposed to do about the future and still love time in the way that the practice of making poems makes me want to. Everyone told me that it’s so hard but it is so hard. I hate being lonely. I believe very much in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s idea of study as social, as what we do together. Poetry is my whole life because it is a way of loving time with people in it. Other people’s presences in my life underwrite every single poem: in friendship, in reading, in daydreaming, in memory. It is a practice and a study that is every day renewed, and that every day reminds me how much of being alive in this place and in this century is fabricated in opposition to that practice and to that study. Hence the alarms. Because how often precarity manifests as a certain kind of loneliness, and vice versa. And all these things are knots. I have been extraordinarily lucky to find out how much I love to make poems and study. To receive this support from the National Endowment for the Arts, at this point in my life, is to be allowed to inhabit a little longer that love. Being young to it, I’m still figuring love out, like how to do it in the future, state or no state, alarms or no alarms. But mostly, because of this encouragement, I get to be around some people I love a lot for longer, and make some poems, and figure some things out. Which is practice, and I’m grateful for that.