Often, when I think of mail, I think of clutter filling my stairway as grocery store ads, credit card applications, and bills gather against the walls and grains of the floor.  With personal letters receding into the past, magazines and Netflix movies have become the redeeming part of a service dominated by waste at the best of times, and bad news at the worst.

Today though, I sent out five poems for publication, and the thought of all those words being passed through such a dreary system lifted my dislike of mail for the briefest of seconds.  How many hands will my poems passed through?  Will the roughness of the sorting machine be less than that of the editor who will either accept or reject what I’ve written?  For the time being they are in transit, undelivered, an envelope of poems migrating across the plains.