Years ago when I was single and in my twenties and living in Oxford, Ohio, I would drive down US 27 and meet my friend Jen on the west side of Cincinnati. She lived on the east side and this was a halfway point for us if we wanted to see each other on a weekday evening. Bob Evans was our place—an easy spot right off the road. We would slide into a booth and order and then talk until we had run out of time or light or both.

Jen and I met our first day of college, and then what cemented our friendship was we had an 8 a.m. chemistry class together that first term, and goodness knows we needed each other in order to make the trudge across campus on those cold mornings to go sit in a lecture hall and hear about elements and who-knows-what-else for an hour. We were bonded after that.

But by our mid-twenties, as we navigated careers and relationships and breakups, we needed each other more. Particularly I was dealing with a demanding job and a boyfriend who seemed to both love and loathe me—Jen and I spent countless hours on that topic (too many, I can see looking back, but I was young and didn’t know all the signs that spelled goodbye).

Which brings me to Jenny Molberg’s poem, “Different Kinds of Sadness,” a poem I have read again and again. (Note: Jenny Molberg is not the same person as Jen, my college friend.) In the author note below the poem, Molberg says that the poem “is a love letter to a friend. I found myself, in the wake of divorce and a subsequent abusive relationship, relying heavily upon my support system of female friends, and I’m interested in challenging the traditional canon of heterosexual love poems by focusing on the often unshakeable and quantifiably more stable relationship that can occur between two women.”

I had that with Jen. I still have that with Jen. We talk nearly every day, and she still gets to/has to hear the ups and down and sideways of my life. Because of Molberg’s poem, I wrote a poem about Jen and our friendship. It’s called “Halfway” and will be published by The Pinch this fall.

Here is Jenny Molberg’s deeply moving poem that inspired me:

This poem was first published in Missouri Review and then later in Molberg’s collection Refusal (LSU Press, 2020). (A note to my author newsletter subscribers: I featured this collection in my June 2020 author newsletter). You can learn more about the poet here.

Thank you, Jenny Molberg, for allowing me to share your beautiful poem here.

You can listen to Robert McCready reciting the poem on his Evening Magic YouTube Channel here.

During the month of April, which is National Poetry Month, I am sharing poems I love from contemporary writers. I hope to pique your interest in poetry, if it needs to be piqued, and to show you that a really great poem can be accessible to all. If you missed the other poems, you can find them here and here and here and here.

Photo credit: Michael Petrila from Unsplash.

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