I met a man with a typewriter in the middle of the street & he had a little stool & a little table where his old remington filled with five by seven sheets of thin paper sat & he was offering poems on any subject you would request & so i introduced myself & asked for a poem about saint louis because it is the city that birthed me & i am in love with him & i have to leave him for college which frightens me the same way any major change will frighten folks: in waves & i had recently been thinking about that change so when i needed a subject really there was no other option & we talked a little because he wanted to be sure my poem was good & when asked what my major was i told him english & he chuckled in that way you do when you have made the same mistake you can see someone else get ready to make but he seemed happy with his english degree & street poetry & if he was not happy he definitely seemed like he was at least flourishing ( which is more important if we are not lying to ourselves ) & when he had enough information he asked for five to ten minutes to piece something together & on royal street it is not hard to find ways to pass the time & i walked maybe twenty feet to a scattered bazaar of artists demonstrating their craft & working to survive like the rest of us & i bought a small plaque so that i can affix it to the wall because i do not want to forget new orleans & because dorms can feel like prisons without any life pumped onto the walls & i admired it as my new poet friend clicked away & when he was done we talked about poetry & we talked about art & we talked about english & that was all out loud because in the poem he wrote about moving on & not wanting to & he wrote about love & it is the type of love for a place that is true no matter what place you may come from / where sometimes it does not feel like love at all & sometimes you do not love it all but it is still your most important love & hate it as you may nothing can change your relationship & deep down we do not want that relationship to end & it is one of the reasons i am coming back to saint louis after college but this is not an essay about coming home or where you are from this is an essay about survival & love & there is not any singular way to love / which is phenomenal news for a universe as vast as our own & what is love is an irrelevant distinction / because what love entails is quite normally the same ( albeit with different lenses ) The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue. This was written by Gabe, one of our summer interns.

The nine billion names of god last line