I waited for a week for the pens to arrive
anticipating the fantastic poems I would write
because, really, the best poems I ever wrote
were done with black gel pens, 20 years ago.

Poems festered in my head, unborn, but waiting
for those pens to arrive. It would be a literary
hurricane at my desk when those pens showed up
all the poems in me, trying to get out.

Another week passed and the pens still hadn’t arrived
hundreds of poems pushed against me, single words,
whole phrases, I could picture myself writing
in the back yard under the tree
I could picture it perfectly, but not without the pens.

When week three had passed, I started to panic
could feel poems from the weeks before fading, replaced by inferior ones
I called up the vendor, who couldn’t understand my panic
said he’d send out a new shipment—
it’d be here in a week.