Kevin McIlvoy lives in Asheville, North Carolina. These two poems are from an unpublished manuscript, Clothesline Cemetery. The title refers to a fictional location in which a small community has put up a set of crisscrossing clotheslines over its small cemetery; laundry days there are days of remembering the dead – or being remembered by them.. The speaker in many of the poems has experienced being a “failing Buddhist,” which is something like being a “fallen Catholic” without the mark of sin. The influence of Thomas Merton and John Berryman mark McIlvoy’s sensibility.