Here is the latest of my short-short stories that are composites of real-life events with psychological or practical implications.

“From cell to Sam: 

the greatest show on earth.”

Emily's given name was Dakota but to channel her favorite poet, she changed it to Emily. That was but one of many things she did to amplify the muse and her identity as a poet.

Emily even poured herself into the artist’s bane—marketing. Not only did she read her work at every poetry slam and open mic she could, and posted her work on poetry websites, she xeroxed and later self-published collections of her poems and read them on a "portable stage:" an upside-down 5-gallon soy sauce bucket. She set up her stage mainly on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley but also on any street studded with progressive literary foot traffic. And she kept producing, poem after poem, collection after collection.

On her deathbed, Emily felt it was all for naught. Sure, a few hundred, maybe even 1,000 people had read or heard her work. But had any remembered any of it, let alone been changed by it? And after she died and could no longer flog her work, her impact would certainly go from almost zero to zero.
Except it didn’t quite. You see, when Brigid was 12, her mother accepted a Xerox copy of Emily’s poems.handed down from the soy sauce bucket. Now, 20 years later, a decade after Emily died, Brigid was torturing herself about whether to have a baby when Emily’s poem, "From cell to Sam: