“In downtown Philadelphia, a sinkhole opened at 22nd and Market and swallowed a Salvation Army building. A number of people died, including a nineteen-year-old girl who was shopping for furniture.” 

“I like a woman with a sense of humor,” he tells me when the waiter has departed with our menus. “But, to be honest, I’m not sure what you meant by this.”

“In our culture of distraction, in which I find myself unable to sit through the entirety of a one-minute video of a dog taking tiny steps on its hind legs to flamenco music before wanting to click on to the next thing, poetry occupies a strange purgatory of time-commitment.”