For a while now, poetry has been a useful way for me to feel and interrogate feeling. Other poets have been my guides, Toi Dericotte’s Undertaker’s Daughter, Jenifer Huang’s Return Flight, Sharon Olds Stag’s Leap, and so many other collections and individual poems have ushered me back into my feelings when tragedy, grief, and the relentlessness of the world renders me numb. In those moments, poetry reminds me it is ok and even good to weep, and remember to take in the shape of the clouds, and the way the wind shakes the trees. Recently, I have begun to feel rather lucky to have poetry, and to have had it for so long. I wrote my first poems as an angsty 12-year-old unsure of what to do with all my big feelings. In one of those poems, I said I felt “like a bear trapped in a cage.” If there were a universe where time travel existed, I’d go back and visit myself then and say “keep going kid—we’re getting out.”