SvenWaring – Not to be confused, of course, with the Large Hardon Collider. Yeah, I made sure to mention that in the call for submissions. Literary magazines have precious few ways to be timely and relevant.

Nathan – Thanks. I was plagiarizing from one of my old poems there with “black rainbows,” though. (I think last time I was writing about starlings.)

dale – Unholiness is my favorite kind of holiness.

Joan – Glad you liked that. I always try to make my poems end with a bit of a bang – if nothing else, it makes readers forget any infelicities earlier on.

Jo and Christine – Thanks. I don’t know that I can take full credit for the flow, but I was uncomfortable with the unspecificity of “crones” in the original (with all due apologies to W.D.). Especially for a poem in the past tense, it felt as if I had to keep the poem as concrete and specific as possible… even though I ended with an abstraction. Well, whatever.

The lint balls in the navels made me laugh. I also love what you did with the birds, how you changed the words around to give a more surreal image of the lawn. I also like the description of the old woman with her stick, it made the whole scene come alive.

Now these, the revisions of the collaborations, are fascinating, though in a slightly unholy way. :-)

Great timing now that the Large Hadron Collider has been turned on and will soon create a universe-wide black hole of death, instead of the negative-gravity cultural vacuum that’s been restricted to parts of central Pa and most of Los Angeles.

Such a fine line between poets and prophets.