Heather Altfeld: “I think this poem is a collision of two kinds of waiting—both are temporally communal, which makes them particularly interesting to me–the counting of the vote, and here in California, the rain, which we are all desperate for. Both portend our immediate and distant future. And despite the critics of personification, there is something about the convergence of such energies that each ballot carries, beyond its bubbled-in dots—each arrives (hopefully) from the homes of smokers or drinkers, chewed by dogs or babies, spat on by rain or dissent, and in this way, they seem to harbor a strange sort of essence of their own.” (web)
Heather Altfeld: “Because much of my life is lived on a very practical level required of someone who teaches six different courses a term, I also have a fanciful life in which I am a practicing physician in the Medieval era, doing research on the history of prior medicine. This poem reflects my deep interest in how the magic and lore of medicine changed over time, and the elements of possibility still lay ahead of us in the fog.” (web)
Heather Altfeld: “This poem is one of my many homages to Richard Hugo, whose work I did not learn about until someone in my writer’s group brought ‘Letter to Kathy from Wisdom’ as a prompt. ‘Read it again, Bob,’ I said, and he did. It wasn’t enough. I’ve gnarled up two copies of 31 Letters and 13 Dreams in the last few years. I wrote this in a meek attempt to capture, as Hugo does, the kind of longing and sadness that time sets and screws into our bones.” (website)