Yesterday was a damn fine day.  I was reading and writing and snacking in my sunny little apartment when, at some point between fistfuls out-of-season blueberries and a turkey sandwich, my friend Phil texted to tell me that the new issue of Tinderbox Poetry Journal was up, in which we both have poems!  (I guess the turkey sandwich was celebratory.)

I got pretty excited about Tinderbox when it first appeared this summer.  They hit the ground running with the first issue, and haven’t lost any steam since, so I’m really grateful to editors Brett Elizabeth Jenkins and Molly Sutton Kiefer for including two of my poems, “Mechanism” and “Window” in number 3.  (Three is also my second favorite number, after nine.  Which is only my favorite number because it’s three threes, and is so, then, “three-er than three,” as my friend Alicia has said.  Which is to say that probably, in the end, three is my favorite number. So…third issue!)

This is one fat baby, and could last you all afternoon if you chew slowly.  In particular, I was into Brandon Amico’s “Wherein a Trip to Western New Hampshire Predicts the Outcome of Our Relationship,” (“A pine cone is to a grenade / as sex is to a pine cone, but I don’t remember // how, exactly;”) all of the poems by Jessica Bixel, but  especially “Almanac” and  “Departure”, as well as “Mountains” by Anna Lea Jancewicz and “The Weight of It” by Nicole Rollender.  I also recommend checking out Philip Schaefer’s “Autobiographies,” which manages to get a circus, a mirage, the state of Idaho, a silver shovel, a piccolo, “talismanic mania,” porcelain dolls, hickeys, and edible jewels all into one poem without losing momentum.  Finally, props to Julie Choffel’s “You and Me Dear,” especially for the phrase “sentient motherfucker.”  Dig in!