“Maybe That’s Just the Way I Read It," with Apologies to Billy Collins, by Jill Mikolaizyk

Workshopping poetry sometimes feels like
making your way through a verbal minefield.
You don’t know how much of someone
goes into the stanzas you’re meant to critique.

What if that image that didn’t work for you,
where the evening bumps into the stars,
is the half remembered fears of a child
who fell from a tree one night
and watched as the night sky came crashing down?
Or what if the blue jeans but standoffish voice
is something cultivated from years of code-switching,
a lifetime of language you thoughtlessly dismissed?

Maybe you just want to go home;
you’re roaming the decaffeinated streets
with a mind full of meetings and due dates
and you’re picking stanzas at random,
praising an image that was inspired
by the cough drops on the writer’s desk
and critiquing a metaphor drawn from
a traumatic memory involving a gardening hose.

How can you know what the author is thinking?
You do your best; you qualify until your words spiral,
say, I don’t know if anyone else was feeling that.
You weren’t trained to diffuse bombs, after all.
The least you can do is give everyone warning,
and hope that no one critiques that line in your poem
that made your eyes sting when you wrote it.