Christine Poreba: “This poem was one of those exciting ones that presented itself nearly whole—at least in skeletal form—in its first freewrite. I was on my annual pilgrimage to Poet’s House in New York City, and wrote in my journal, first, that ‘I had been too long away from reading poetry,’ and then—after several pages of notes on the poems I had read—that I was ‘almost tired from reading poetry. Almost ready. Almost done … Almost implies closer than near by itself, but almost close means far.’ Thankfully, none of those lines made it into the poem, but they did offer me an entrance into the poem, which is one of my favorite moments in the process of writing poetry.” (website)