ALT On Cost A former student writes you a note about sadness. They want to know how to write poems in which sadness does not “overpower the main message.” The sharing of sadness, they say, has a cost. You think about this a long time, think a snake shedding skin, the skin being found months later, after the rain, alongside a drift of new fall leaves, the bright scent of disintegration. This is what you will tell your former student. Godspeed, ends your reply. God slow, they write back, if there is a god, it is slow. I reply this is a good line of poetry, joke that I would like to steal it. I am welcome to steal it, they reply, but they will, maybe, steal it back. When my father died, I began to shoplift from a close-by store, a cheap chain. I put things into my canvas bag—avocados, vegan cheese, dark chocolate—thinking-without-thinking: I deserve this. I felt that when or if I was caught, I would simply burst into tears before security. My father died, I would wail aloud, inconsolable, he