Notes from packing my books for the move to Brooklyn

1.  I used to be so careful.  Tiny handwriting.  Blank sheets of paper folded into exact fourths and stuck into books to be found ten or eleven years later.  That trick.

2.  Dear American authors of the nineteenth century.  Dear Whitman.  Dear Poe.  Stop calling people "half-breeds."

3.  "Bolt upright in my bed that night/ I saw my father flying;/ the wind was walking on my neck,/ the windowpanes were crying."  --Stanley Kunitz

4.  You once sent me a large shoe box of poetry books you were finished with.  Most of them were creased and smudged and had receipts stuck in them because you used to carry poetry books everywhere in the large pockets on your shorts.  In one you had written a note to yourself:  "The exalted calm."

5.  Now in my author bio, I can be like all those other people and go, "Joanna Penn Cooper was born in 1980.  She lives in Brooklyn."  Part of it will be accurate.  The Brooklyn part.