When I was six years old, my father--a very serious and guarded man--accidentally cut off part of his own big toe with the lawn mower. Doctors grafted skin from my father’s thigh over the wound, but the unfortunate side-effect was that hair began to grow from the tip of the toe. In an attempt to cheer my father up, I wrote my first poem, “The Hairy Toe,†which was about a hairy toe that ran away from its foot after being teased by all the other “normal†toes. My father’s laughter as he read the poem taught me that words have the power to break through any barrier. Since writing that first poem nearly five decades ago, I have had poems published in dozens of literary magazines and in four chapbooks: The Weight of Smoke (Bottom Dog Press), Whisper Gallery (Mudlark), Everyday Elegies (Pudding House), and Afraid of Heaven (Mudlark).