With Apologies to Emily Dickinson

Hope is a nuisance, if you ask me. Which you probably won’t. People rarely ask my opinion. So all us feathered things are better off.

Hope has claws, tentacles, sharp little teeth. It scrounges in the soul, making a noise like yellow jackets caught between an exterior wall and a sheet of plasterboard.

Hope may starve, but it doesn’t quit. All winter it circles a basement with a Mason jar full of fireflies, releasing one for each upstairs light that fails.