Luck of the Draw

You get a five-star Goodreads review
(from your mom) on the novel whose
form rejection slips are fanned out on your desk
like the tail feathers of Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks.

At a bar, with the friends you haven’t seen since your MFA,
you listen to the guy with the TV show
tell the girl you almost slept with that
the next big literary scandal
will pit Hilary Mantel against
a hipster carrying a vintage typewriter
into an artisanal cafe.

You nod.
You almost sleep with the girl again,
then don’t.
Instead, she goes home to her spouse
and you go home to yours.

The Sorting Hat put you into
Found Poetry House,
which is where Shelley
would have put Frankenstein’s monster,
you swear. Because that’s where
every horror belongs
(where they begin also).

The late nights you keep,
the words you write
only with the help of this deck of cards—
you feel like a grumpy dwarf
excreted from a giant worm
into Haruki Murakami’s running shoes.

But the words make you laugh
and maybe they will do the same for another,
and maybe that’s enough.