one Sunday each month in the loft,
and today, newly turned fourteen,
about to start high school, she

unleashes two new songs with
dense lyric structures, packed with
mature metaphor many older

songwriters lack. She, fresh from
a concert featuring two of her favorite
former-boy-band-now-grownup singers,

arrives glowing about traveling to LA
with her mom for her first live show,
about making a new friend there, and

ooh! they’ve got tickets to another
concert in town in September,
her smile dimpling her cheeks.

I’m again amused and delighted
by her enthusiasm and precocious
creative skills, imagining her onstage

someday, her own kind of singer-
songwriter, this girl poet and fiction
writer blossoming like summer roses

before me—a bit like me at that age
but even better, more capable, more
confident. I’ve got another one

I just wrote last night, she says,
searching her phone for the lyrics
she tapped with her long-nailed

fingertips, words coming to her
so quickly she could hardly get
them down fast enough.

She hands me the phone to read.
Wonderful, I say. Sing it to me.
And she does.