An open book

I am not young enough, or naked enough to get good photographs done for free anymore. I am okay with that; I had my picture made a lot in my twenties and then with the the babies, and I felt like I would wait until I had a few deeper lines in my face before having more done. But I need to pull together some biographical/publicity material for my trip to Ireland next month, and in my most recent set of professional prints, I am seven months pregnant and busting out of a silk nightie. Probably not suitable, even for those swinging, boho Europeans.

I wish I lived in California and was friends with this this amazing photographer so I could beg her to make my picture and get one of these from her for the courage to be apart from my babies and on the road with my poems for two whole weeks. Because while it sounds all very exciting right now, at some point in the near future there will be the whole Atlantic Ocean between me and mine, and Skype won't give me the smell of their hair.

Between you and me, that's probably the real reason I have been putting off getting this pr stuff together. I tell everybody else (like the people waiting for it) it's just because I hate bios. That's partly true. It feels ridiculous writing about yourself in third person, and I've always thought that the work should speak for itself. But then I found this terrific poem in an anthology and was all like, oh my god, who wrote this, and there was a bio in the back that was a say-nothing one-liner, like mine usually are. I was beyond frustrated. I wanted to know everything, and I got nothing. Zilch. I felt like I'd been slapped with a restraining order.

So I took my own picture and I wrote the damn thing (posted over here, for the curious—please don't tell the other poets I have a blog, or the other bloggers that I am a poet). The plane tickets have been booked for months. The children are excited about seeing their grandmother. I am lining up an eclectic roster of guest posters to help out here while I am gone. All the details are pretty much taken care of. I have nothing left to do for the next six weeks but panic.