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The poem, “Wishbones,” was inspired by a line of wishbones on my windowsill. I live on a farm, and we had a surplus of roosters who were raping the hens. They became dinner, and their bones were featured in a little graveyard above the kitchen sink. The line of scapulas was over two-feet-long by the time my son finally visited; we split them for about ten minutes.

I was teaching a poetry workshop at Salinas Valley State Prison. There’s so much sensory deprivation there—everything drab and colorless, but the men in the class are hungry for scholarly conversations. I shared an article on how language shapes our perceptions. In one study, children from a tribe whose lexicon didn’t include a word for blue were less able to “see” blue. This led to a discussion about how poets try to describe things for which words don’t already exist. Then someone asked, “Do they ever discover new colors?”

These pieces were both written while sitting on a patio in Irvine, CA, the ur-suburb where I’ve lived since grad school. Irvine is a strange place, and not one I love unreservedly, but where I am, the area around the university, there’s some untouched riparian wilderness left (as well as a golf course and some sculpted parks where nature makes do) so outside the patio in my apartment complex was this fake pond and there would often be a Great Blue Heron pacing there and picking up sticks for its nest, or Cooper’s Hawks circling. When I wrote each of these two poems, I was sitting on that patio, watching that pond for signs of the next poem.

Cities, a collection of short fiction released last year by Elizabeth Thorpe, reads like a photo album. Each story homes in on a moment, an event, a person. . .

I am often drawn to write a poem because of a line, rather than an image. The image comes later. I am almost always more concerned with sound and tempo; the pleasure of hearing one word against another and the re-contextualized meanings that occur after the pause in a line break have always taken precedence over scene or subject.

The key to writing the queer and genderqueer self into existence is to access radical vulnerability—of being available to be watched—so I can create a space for the reader that gives them that same opportunity to access the untouched parts of themselves.

I have always wrestled with philosophy of physics in my poetry, with the difficulty imagining reality (Feynman said the scientific imagination is like a straightjacket, and that it’s easier to picture invisible angels than electromagnetic waves), with the traps of metaphor, and the mysteries of language.

I’ve received a lot of advice over the years, and I think almost all of it has been good, but the pieces that have stuck with me the most are those that I received at exactly the time when I needed them most. At eight it was: “You know, you don’t have to end every poem with the word ‘eternity.'”

I spent twenty years in New Mexico, a time when I was trying to reconstruct my life, like Williams, after losing my faith. My essay pays tribute to the desert Southwest, where I found a measure of healing.

The inspiration came when I was in my hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, and my family and I found a bird on the asphalt. Then a neighbor told me, “This is the season when the baby birds fall out of their nests.”