After less than 48 hours in London, I boarded a train headed to Paris. By the time I arrived, checked in, and unpacked, it was nearly midnight. I laid in bed, exhausted and ready for sleep. Looking up I spied this on my ceiling:

I snapped a picture of it thinking, I’m definitely going to write a poem about that! and then I passed out for five hours, till my alarm chimed and I pulled myself out of bed and readied for my day.

Every day was filled with long meetings with various organizations – NATO, European Space Agency, L’ecole Militaire – and every day I fought against the jet lag that was bearing down hard on me. We had several required social events and on nights where there weren’t required events, I wandered the city with colleagues. This meant every night I was up till at least 11pm which didn’t help my jet lag. But it’s Paris! A city I love! So it was worth it to forgo a little bit of sleep.

One afternoon we were meeting with our French colleagues at L’ecole Militaire and because we have a joint project with them, we wanted to get to know each other a little bit better. We went around the room stating our name, our background, and something interesting about ourselves. When it was my turn I stated the required information and then stated that I was a published poet with a new book coming out in March 2020. Few of my US colleagues knew this and certainly none of my French colleagues did so everyone was quite surprised.

That evening, after our required social event — which had us drinking champagne and eating hors d’oeuvres while enjoying a fantastic view of the Eiffel Tower — my colleagues and I settled into the hotel bar for another drink.

My colleagues inquired about my poetry and I told them a little about my book, Beautiful & Full of Monsters, and about my poetry in general. Then someone asked a question they may have ultimately regretted: “Can you read us some of your poems?”

Never one to shy away from reading poetry, I told them I would read a poem that had been published that very day, Did Not, published by Dovecote. They fell into a hush when I started reading and then the look of surprise and on some faces – shock – stared back at me. I continued with Butcher, which was a finalist in Furious Gazelle’s 2019 Spring Writing Contest. And then I laughed and said, “I’ll read you a lighter one!” and read To My Ex Who Asked if Every Poem was About Him. By the time I finished most sat in stunned silence. Yes, I could have eased them into my poetry with poems that are a little less intense…but that’s not really what I write and I’m proud of these poems and think they’re a good representation of what I write. I mean, if you’re going to jump into poetry you may as well do it head-first.