Back home at last after a whirlwind of poetry, family (almost every member of my family drove into Chicago to see me for at least one day from Cincinnati, and all seperately, so you can imagine the fun) and quick tourist-ing (Field Museum with its giant dinosaurs and the Art Institute, Millenium Park in the rain, driving around Lake Michigan when the waves were ten feet high.) I didn’t get to do any shopping, due to my very low current freelance income, which was a shame, because the shopping in Chicago looked fantastic. In every window, another temptation. On the last full day I got to have lunch with Brandi Homan (whose lovely Dancing Girl Press chapbook, Two Kinds of Arson, is very worth checking out) and coffee with Jessa Crispin (who runs Bookslut and, check it out, was named one of Wired Magazine’s Hottest Geeks of 2005.) and a friend of hers who is a professional confectioner. Doesn’t that sound like a great job?

Still kind of under the weather with the cough and head thing, for which I have now been on antibiotics for, what, like fifteen days now? Dang. Hard to shake. But we made chicken soup with fennel and onion at midnight last night on our arrival, and are now working on a large pot of homeade beef vegetable stew, to be taken with orange juice. If those things can’t cure me, well, there’s no help except to move to a warm, sunny, dry climate.

In other poetry news:
I came home to a really nice issue of Eleventh Muse, which included many fine poems (that admittedly I have only skimmed) and my poem “Rescuing Seiryu, the Blue Dragon.” I ended up liking the poem when I read it again, it seemed to have not been written by me at all but by some alter ego. Isn’t it weird when that happens?

Now, I seriously have to recover before the next two readings – Saturday the 21st and Monday the 23rd. I’ll be under my comforter, watching 30 Rock and Colbert Report recordings, until then.