By Charles M. Sumid      Copyright 2025      Written 2008

Started young: eight, maybe nine,
reading Dickens with scissors,
cutting out every “which” and “whom,”
watching stories bleed but somehow live.

Library books defaced with penciled corrections:
“Hemingway needs commas here”
until the librarian banned her for a month.

She spent it writing stories backwards,
last word to first,
learning how endings change everything that comes before.

She remembers the moment:
sophomore year, failing composition,
when she wrote “ain’t” seventeen times in one paragraph.

Her professor circled every one.

“Why?” he asked.

“To see what happens when the blood shows.”

That’s when she knew:
rules were bones,
and breaking them was how you learned anatomy.

Fragment sentences that cut. Like. Glass.

Dangling modifiers swinging from cliffs,
split infinitives opened to show their hidden light.

Each error a door to understanding
why correctness exists.

Now her red pen knows when to rest.

This fragment stands.
That run-on runs exactly where it needs.

She saves manuscripts by knowing which sacred rule to break:
the comma splice that lets the heart beat twice,
the passive voice that hides the knife.

“Leave it,” she writes in margins.

“This error is the only thing that’s true.”