I've been published in Shampoo four memorable times. Del Ray Cross has always taken work of mine that was (for me) experimental and had represented a new step.
"They Say I Should Be Used To It" was written in the summer of 2022. I had moved out of Boston to live in Rhode Island with a partner who would dump me less than a month later (but not before the decision to move in with her estranged me from my family for a few months).
We were staying in a hotel for a getaway vacation I couldn't afford. Money was running out for the stupidest of reasons. I only needed to lift an arm to feel the walls closing around me.
This was the low point in my life that I don't think has been quite matched since.
In that stage of my time as a poet, I barely averaged one poem per year.
I don't know what possessed me to write then and there in that hotel, but it clearly helped to save me.
By fall, I was out of that situation, starting a new life in South Boston. Seeing that poem published in Shampoo #14 on my work computer that October was a bittersweet bookend to that dreadful era.
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