Deep inside the bookstore stacks
the featured poet readies her pages

for the reading. As I introduce myself
she exclaims that only yesterday

she read one of my poems and loved
my line breaks—the sharp clarity

and extended layering I built into
the poem’s lines. She fumbles for her phone

to show me as I stand dumbfounded,
ask her where she found me, to which

of my poems she was referring.
Viewing it on her cell, I’m reminded

of how natural things break, sometimes
into greenstick splinters, sharpened

points. Others in crisp snaps like a twig
too dry to survive, and those abandoned

but with tiny shoots signaling life.
How a genealogy of words can start over,

past tense to future perfect.
And that lines don’t always end

where they should—some scrawl
their path to a special place, begin again

here.