A real honest unstaged photo of my Tallahassee, FL apartment bed this (9/10/16) morning at 10:03 AM EST, featuring:
- my Wall of Poets—I’ve kept such a wall of current poet obsessions over my bed for years, hoping, maybe, that their wisdom might seep into me in my sleep, the way sleep tapes (claim to) do their work. The poets go up and down, can stay for weeks or months or years. Right now, the lineup is: Anne Carson, Carl Phillips, Franz Wright, Mary Ruefle, Fanny Howe, Wislawa Szymborska, Sohrab Sepehri, William Packard, Ross Gay, Robert Hayden, Jean Valentine, and Ellen Bryant Voigt.
- Filfy, now five, who I’ve had since he was a tiny abandoned three-week old flea-bitten runt. When I got him, he had ear mites, ringworm, roundworm, fleas, a respirtatory infection, and basically everything else that a sick cat can have. Now he’s perfectly healthy and perfect and loves to sleep on my face.
- Filfy’s favorite toy, a little chime-y mouse, which I’m pretty sure he brought onto the bed himself.
- Anaïs Duplan’s extraordinary Take This Stallion, still on my bed from our Divedapper interview conducted yesterday.
- a Kindle that I hardly ever use anymore but am currently using to read Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad.
- Kim Kyung Ju’s I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World, an importantly weird book I was rereading last night. It also has one of my favorite book covers ever.
- working draft of my forthcoming Alice James manuscript, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, which I’m kind of always half-working on, which never really seems to leave my side. I do all my reading and revising in bed.
- bedside Sriricha (I have more in the fridge and the cabinets). I go through a lot of Sriracha.