Dear Melissa Carroll, my painter. Up there in heaven, I hope you have prepared a living room for us. Riddled with the most baffling knickknacks from every corner of the universe. Whimsical, but tasteful. Beautiful glass bongs on the coffee table with sweet White Widow tamped in the bowls. I hope you’ve memorized the number of the best Indian restaurant in heaven. And that you’ve curated an infinite list of bizarre, disorienting comedies on Netflix. Thank you for being a true artist, and for sharing the burden of Ewing’s Sarcoma with me. You were my Virgil in all this: the grandest, most bizarre, most disorienting Comedy. I followed. Am following. Keep me safe, I pray.

I thank Alan Ziegler, Big Wig Zig, for being my guidepost to a lifepath full of Buddhist-shtetl humor, deep compassion, and lucid, gorgeous writing. I will never forget your performance of your own work. It changed the way I read and am. And I will never forget the wonderful drinks at Candle 79. And my time spent with your luminous Erin. Victoria and I often say we want to grow up to be you two as a couple.

I thank Sarah Matthes, my poem-kin, writer who shares my project, for her invaluable insight over many years into this book and the many poems that preceded it, and into me as a person. Our love is deep and true, and I can always rely on you to know what my heart is trying to say in a poem, even when the words aren’t quite there yet. Every poet needs a reader like that.

I thank Sarah Blake, who has taught me so much and become such a magnificent friend in such a condensed period of time. Your work makes me feel like no one else’s in the world does, and your comments on my work make me feel so loved, so understood, and so almost-there-but-here’s-exactly-the-right-solution. You make sure I’m safe in this big crazy poetry world, and I couldn’t ask for a better big poetry sister in my corner. And you are the best person in the world to text in the middle of the night during a panic attack.

I thank Jenny Franklin and Fred Marchant, the lions who not only put their ink on my work, but pounded every door they could to help this book see light. And thanks to you two, it did! Jenny, you have laser vision and a heart of sugar. And Frank, you are a wise hand parting the waves. I love you, thank you.