A sequel of sorts

 (from Best American Poetry, 2024). I've come to love these short introductions from the published poets.  This one is especially playful and illuminating.

Spaide writes: "Three notes on a poem fixated on triads, thirds, and three-peats:

1. I'm Not Dying, You're Dying' was written in and about the month of March. Not, canonically speaking, the cruelest month, but in Massachusetts, where I was then living, it's a frontrunner for the crummiest. Far from looking like the glorious season Gerard Manley Hopkins praises in his sonnet 'Spring' (quoted in my epigraph), a Massachusetts March is the triple point of three chaotically coexisting seasons: spring taking its good old time; winter overstaying its welcome; and, once ice thaws and slush sloshes away to reveal grayed, zombified leaves, fall coming back from the dead.
2. That March marked the third anniversary of a death I had commemorated in a scatterbrained elegy titled 'Recycler' (Poetry, January 2018). I set out to write a sequel of sorts: an attempt to gauge whether I was moving on, running in circles, or going nowhere.
3. That month-as in most months—I was spending too much time online. Feeling inundated by push notifications, trolly anonymous comments, and headlines summarizing tragedies of every scale (from the next-door to the world-wide), I started toying with the Internet slang crowding out my thoughts: I'm not crying, you're crying; Tweets capped with the transparently opaque phrase asking for a friend; rest in peace abbreviated to a swift, cartoonish monosyllable, rip.

It's been a few springs: what's changed? I still hate March, I keep writing dead-people poems, I couldn't ditch the Internet, but I did leave Massachusetts."