The Dash

This poem and print is dear to me because it's the first art print I've ever sold. It's also the first poem of mine that made me money outside of a magazine publication or through my own poetry books. It showed me that poetry cannot be bound to just one type of medium. 

It's surreal to think that something I created, something that originated as a thought in my head, became an actual product, and will now lives in someone's home.

I wrote "The Dash" a long time ago after I did photography at an old beautiful cemetery, and was transfixed by the dash between the birth date and death date on a tombstone.

At the time, I was an aspiring architect and I wanted to design a mausoleum for a public cemetery where non-identified people were buried, such as people whose family members could not be found and notified, or those who could not be identified at all through dental reccords or DNA testing. 

My ambitions of becoming an architect faded, but the poetry remained.