Pete Hamill Died on My Birthday

(Elegaic Musings on A Drinking Life)

— William Carlos Williams, from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

“We live with a callous on the heart” — Pete Hamill, Essay on Blood on the Tracks

Pete Hamill died on my birthday. I was scrolling on twitter the day his death was announced when I learned Pete Hamill had passed. “He was very important to me,” I tweeted, typing this almost automatically, without much thinking. I felt such walloping woe in the moment. I’m a feminist poet. I’ve moved on, in many ways, from straight, white, male…