When I was still in the dark place, I wrote a poem,

     only feathers string me up across the sky, one nudge or wrinkle and I fall, crash through violet dusk and skyscrapers, this wingless, landlocked, flattened creature of despair 

that described the fragile threads/feathers that kept me from falling through the sky. I drew a version of the poem, and what appeared shortly after on my canvas was an angel that hovered above the city, pulled upward by her wings. People saw in her what they needed to:  a guardian angel, an angel of hope or an angel of sorrow. That painting is Angel Over the City.

 

The painting appears on the cover of Brandon Pitt’s powerful book of poetry, Tender in the Age of Fury. For more about Brandon Pitts, visit http://www.brandonpitts.com/