the good thing about crying is you don’t really have to pick a subject.

Paige insists this kind of advice must be ignored: “Don’t trust anyone who says ‘Poetry has had enough of these things.’ Because what they’re actually saying is ‘I have had enough of these things.’ & how could anyone who’s ‘had enough of the moon’ be right about poetry?”43

But no, Dokli goes on to explain that she and the people she works and weeps alongside are all widows. Their tears are not mere examples of form; they are lines of grief carried over onto a new page.

“I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real,” writes Robert Desnos to his beloved, “I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.”

I do not want to cry. I want to be a poet. I want to look at the words with a dry and unswollen face.

The car is a private crying area. If you see a person crying near a car, you may need to offer help. If you see a person crying inside a car, you know they are already held.

We all flicker. For just a moment, we have moved inside the poem.

I’m chopping onions for dinner when a professor on a podcast describes a medieval statue of the Virgin Mary whose miraculous tears were, in fact, generated by the movements of fish swimming around in a chamber of water hidden inside her head. The chamber was filled nearly to the brim, so that if a few fish had a moment of simultaneous vigor, the

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball. And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal