For upwards of a year now, I have been opening a blank document on my computer and blinking forcefully at it to make the right words tumble from my head to my screen. I always eventually get overwhelmed and frustrated with the slow nature of language. At least, the meaningful stuff is slow. My most profound thoughts rarely spill from me effortlessly; every letter and poem is a rumination that takes place over many weeks. I think it is usually my audience that gives me pause— sometimes the greater world, sometimes a lover, sometimes a peer, and sometimes (as in this case) an inspiration.

This blank document has been titled To Hanif Abdurraqib. You are the artist who made me want to be a writer. You made me call myself a poet. It’s daunting to produce a written confession of my admiration for you— I want to lay out exactly what I mean: explain how this love affair began and give your gift for language the proper reverence. And, admittedly, I want you to think I am good at this whole writing thing. I want you to read something I wrote and see where your words are rooted (if only in my affinity for long titles). But I am days away from attending your tour in the wake of the release of your new book, and in the hopes that I get a chance to say hello, I want to have something written down to hand you, not just a blank document that hopefully radiates affection.

In the introductory paragraph of my résumé, I describe myself as “a dedicated student who experiences the world through poetry.” And as cheesy as this is (I’m trying to get those summer internships, what can I say), it’s also true. Poetry has clung to me like a burr since I was fourteen years old; stretched out on the lawn of the culinary school across the street from my middle/high school where my creative writing class would go when winter was finally chased away by the first green leaves. On this lawn, on a spring day during my eighth-grade year, I was first shown “For The Dogs Who Barked at Me on the Sidewalks of Connecticut.” My poetry teacher— who feels very much like a mother figure and who, over the last eight years, has done me the service of placing at my feet poem after poem after poem— had printed copies for myself and all my classmates. A ripple ran through that gaggle of fourteen-year-olds upon reading your poem. We were hit suddenly with the beauty that could be infused into language and transformed from sixteen children who write into sixteen budding writers.

Nearing the end of middle school, we each were dealing with a kind of rain: the downpour of friendship dramas and crushes and first sexual experiences and bullies. The poem hardened into a body that looped between our crisscrossed forms before splitting, draping a version of itself over each of us like a raincoat. As we all traded our interpretations, I saw for the first time that the same bundle of words could be custom-fitted to every reader. For Zuza it was about loneliness, for Dakota it was about her mother. For me, it was about my first queer crush, though I didn’t know myself well enough to be aware of that at the time. She was beginning to grow weary of my desire to always be around her and was creating a distance between us that I couldn’t close—your poem spoke neatly to my anxieties about smothering someone you only wish to love.

Your poem has attached itself to me in new ways over the years, and within every read, I unearth old relationships and feelings. Though the words have never changed, they have become a mirror for my first gay crush, when I came out as queer and later as trans, the friend in high school who was hurting in a way she was never willing to let me understand, the pleas I directed towards my father when I moved out and started testosterone, the work I have done to untangle my understanding of myself from my current love. I keep a tab group open on my phone with a link to the dog-themed WordPress page where I most frequently access your poem, with an analysis at the end that concludes the theme of the poem is “dogs can’t help being dogs,” which I suppose is true— depending on who the dogs are to you. It is when I find myself pausing and thinking too much about my words’ audience that I open this page and read your poem to remind myself of the way it held me through all my biggest feelings, to remind myself that I write because I want to give someone the words that act as a raincoat.