This poem is really about chosen lonliness. Of course, the security guard in the poem did offer these things. He offers without really understanding that it is a two-way street and that whatever he offers will need to be reimbursed two-fold. The priest in FSF’s beautiful story “Absolution’ has chosen a hermetic life of God, and in real life that priest was very influential for Fitzgerald as a young man, and the story appeared in the Mercury in June 1942. The real-life priest turned out to be completely bizarre in an almost surreal way. I was thinking about how young people get so influenced by the almost whimsical ideas of older people. So, it is not really a loss of innocence that I was thinking about, but a return to the glow of childhood and the divine magic of it.

Gloria Monaghan is a Professor of Humanities at Wentworth University. She has published five books of poetry including Flawed (Finishing Line Press), Torero (Nixes Mate), The Garden (Flutter Press), False Spring (Adelaide), and Hydrangea (Kelsay Books). Her sixth book is forthcoming in 2023 from Lily Poetry Review. Gloria’s poems have appeared in Alexandria Quarterly, NPR, Poem-a-Day, Lily Poetry Review, Mom Egg Review, among others. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, and the Griffin Prize.