I never wanted to be a writer when I was a little girl. I wanted to be a singer. I wanted to be a rock star. I use to believe there were people behind the trees who were writing down all the songs I made up and sang out loud, because every so often I would hear them on the radio. As a child I had no idea how the body remembers.

Here is the color of love. I tell my girl this when we’re all together. Remember this day, remember this color. See the thing is, I’m not a writer I’m a remember, everything in me is being stored. Everything you ever said, all the words can fall away but in me they still exist. And I will write them down.

When I wrote my first song on the back of my school book, my teacher made me go to the office. The office had me go to the “special trailer” where all the kids drooled and wet their pants. The woman there smelt like lemons. She told me, she was a special teacher, a person for the kids who drooled and a person for those kids who wrote poems on the backs of their books. The kids who were so smart, things didn’t always fit in their heads. She told me I was gifted.

My first poem was the thing that saved me, from boys on the playground who made me eat dirt, from Mrs. Truscott who spelt like glue. It gave me a small tin house filled with books, a woman who brushed my hair back from my eyes, who read me Whitman and Hugo. My first poem told me I was special.

I never wanted to be writer. I wanted to be a rock star. But the poems found me and they told me to remember.