this is not a newsletter, it's a poem.

Hello from New Orleans, where I am writing and haunted and happy.

I wanted to share this little poem that arose with me as I looked out the window this morning. I had a moment where I thought, "Well, this isn't the sort of thing an email list is for. This isn't 'newsletter' material."

This voice in my head that occasionally gets to me before I know better wants me to listen to "Marketing Advice" and "Business Strategy" but look - that's never been me. I just like saying hello to you from Out Here to wherever you are Out There. Sometimes, yes, that is an excitable update about stretch goals and new albums and stuff...but other times it's maybe just a poem. I think that's probably ok.

So here it is. Maybe you will read it as I wrote it, with a mug of something warm in hand.

****

I awake to a storm in The Marigny.
The humidity, which was content to hang languid as a drapery all day,
crashes suddenly into the sidewalk gardens.
 
One might think the gray would dull the painted quilt of Dauphine,
but the street rises to the challenge, splashes on splashes,
a watercolor riot refusing to wash away.
 
There is something here which simultaneously welcomes and resists decay -
The cycle of undoing and repair, the neighborhood a phenomenon of nature,
composting and emerging with no regard for human ideas of permanence.
 
The past doesn't go anywhere.
it's happening even now as we make plans,
a dandelion through ruptured pavement.

****

Juliana