She was born just a couple miles from where I grew up, it turns out, though I didn’t know that until I looked it up just now. I knew, but had forgotten, that she initially enrolled at my alma mater, but left after just one semester, having failed the majority of her writing assignments, depleted all the money she’d saved, and—maybe most surprising in hindsight—been rejected by the college newspaper. Later, she enrolled at (and graduated from) a university just up the road from where I live now, worked in a department store three blocks from here, was buried in a cemetery you can see my house from, and posthumously had her childhood home (in the neighborhood where my elementary school sat but, more famously, across the street from Phil Donahue’s house) named to the National Register of Historic Places. This isn’t really about her, though—at least it’s not about how I admired or emulated her, or how many commonalities or crossed paths we shared. It’s more what we didn’t have in common that has me thinking about her now. ..

“It’s a Claus-terfuck.”

Jason Isbell was doing some mid-concert banter between songs and describing on stage what both he and I had seen outside earlier—and why we both were feeling happy to be indoors now. I laughed at the term he’d spontaneously coined there in the moment while simultaneously chastising myself for not having thought of it first. My pun skills were slipping—that particular turn of phrase hadn’t occurred to me a couple hours earlier, but I definitely had been feeling more than a little Claus-trophobic as I wandered the Cincinnati streets in search of some pre-show dinner when what to my wondering eyes should appear but twelve thousand drunk Santas, all fucked up on beer…

It’s a prime number,
after all. A product only
of itself

and solitude,
natural and indivisible without
remainder,

and greater than
one—ironic,

then, given the amount of
multiplication
it took to get us here. Division,

too—purposely, cynically
sowed for individual
gain by those and

to those of the prime
conviction that there is
no number
greater than one…