Intro By Graham Foust

I look to Sally Delehant for sentences: "Spring is practically gray, and I thank it"; "There has always been / a certain goody in the shade." You or I could have written those, but I guess we didn't want it bad enough. Sucks, as they say, to be us.

It's difficult to say just how one knows that a certain person's poems are the result of much hard work, and it's as difficult to say just how one knows that a writer took great pleasure in the act of composition. But we've all seen enough smug, dull poems come down the pike to know what lazy, bored poets produce, and so perhaps we assume diligence and enthusiasm simply by way of our own great pleasure in having worked through a particular poem or set of them.

In any case, I trust Sally labors over her poems and lives for said labor, whether she's making them at whatever leisure she can find or as she marches off to work for a company of which she's not vice president. I think you'll pick up on this and want more. Her poems are the sound of someone fooling neither you nor herself. Hunt them down and love them.

Rain Not Little Bunny
We fell as Peter Rabbit himself,
swaddled in soft repose and upon lettuce beds. Morning angled
our poem just so, allowed long shadows to swallow its backwood stretches.

				Hey you. Did Mr. McGregor sleep well? Would he like his eggs 
coddled and under chandelier light? We dance the page in a prism, go lippity— 
lippity— not very fast, I harang you from my barstool, slutting up the joint.

				Hey ho. This is happenstance, a remembering of pinball shaken rain.
We know a couple who forgives through a storm as their son cries outside the 
		bedroom door—
not a sparrow to save him. This is the practicality of the story

and this is what we told our playmates, twelve times twelve.
The two dogs slurped spaghetti. At the end of the meal, the Tramp nosed the last 
		meatball toward her.
Our waitress picks up a fallen fork—

									two ears now visible on her lower back. She’s stamped. 
We want to induce a snuggle. We want to reduce our waist size and wink. Our tales 
sally forth, we touch undercover. We flare like this.
      

Sally Delehant is a graduate of St. Mary's College of California's MFA program. Some of her work can be found in Calaveras, Columbia Poetry Review, The Cultural Society and io: A Journal of New American Poetry. She lives in Chicago.