Ohio is balking at the border of winter and spring, reluctant to step over the line, though it’s all she’s been talking about for months. The neighbor’s crocuses are up, and our trees have buds. Soon it will be time to plant herbs and flowers and, not long after that, complain about the heat.

This week a couple 2015 poetry collections I had missed the first time around: My Feelings by Nick Flynn (Graywolf) and A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes by Madhur Anand (McCelland & Stewart). I also read Rachel Hadas’s Questions in the Vestibule from last year, which I’ll be reviewing here soon.

On the prose front, I read Rios de la Luz’s weird and lovely short story collection The Pulse Between Dimensions and the Desert from Ladybox Books, as well as Girls on Film by Kathryn Kulpa (Paper Nautilus).

I read a couple fun zines this week as well, including And We Dreamt About It Together: Memoirs from the 7th Grade Student at Curtis Elementary published by 826Chi, a very cool branch of the national 826 literacy organization. If you’re ever in Wicker Park in Chicago, check out their Secret Agent Supply Company shop. Finally, I read Amtrak: Adventures Through the South by Sophie Ioannou and Sarah Crowder, which I’ll be reviewing here soon.

As a family, we’re rereading the Harry Potter series aloud, and just finished The Goblet of Fire. We watched the movie this week. I’ve had a rough relationship with every Harry Potter movie except the Alfonso Cuaron-directed The Prisoner of Azkaban, which is probably something I need to do some writing about. And speaking of Cuaron, I also finally caught up with his 2001 Y To Mamá También, an erotic comedy coming-of-age about two teenage boys (Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal) who are aided in their personal and sexual awakening by a 28-year-old woman (Maribel Verdú). Finally, I watched We’re No Angels, starring Humphrey Bogart, Peter Ustinov, Aldo Ray, Joan Bennett, and Basil Rathbone. The comedy falls a bit flat much of the time, and Ray and Bogart are not at their sharpest, but it’s still amusing enough to be worth the time.

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The title of this post is taken from the poem “Put the Load on Me” from Nick Flynn’s My Feelings.