i'm_the_same_age_as_his_daughter tender_square yet he hangs around my desk, ruddy and sheepish, looking like the young irish boy he once was, trying to hide something from his mother, unconvincingly. he tells me he likes my stanzas when surely he prefers my stems. "you play with words more than i do," he says, and i can’t tell if it’s praise from a peer or a put-down from a parent. i should have demurred when he asked if he could show me his, because i knew that he’d been poised for this, yet i am nothing if not nice; professionally trained in the art of circular transactions. my resentment, folded tidy, folded smaller, so many times the creases became the dividing line between who i am and whom i’m expected to be— but that boundary dissolves, quick now like his cotton-candy compliments forced upon my tongue and anger hardens in my throat like a shard of glass i cannot swallow: pestling his prose to pulp, i shove that tasteless paste into his eager mouth, because his stunned silence deserves to speak for all those writers whose pens loiter on the valley between pert breasts, where sweat collects in pools they’d sooner drown in. 220220 what's it to you? who go blather from