I’m due to leave for south India next week with my husband of not yet a full year. Twenty-three hours on a plane to visit my 4’8" tall grandmother on her rubber tree plantation.

Twenty-three hours for my husband to meet her for the very first time.

Twenty-three hours until the first mosquito bite.

Since we both teach at the same college, in the same department, and have offices just down the hall from each other—it’s an unwritten rule that no “school stuff” passes the threshold of our bedroom door. Since this is early May, this is especially trying because we are in the middle of grading final exams: for me, this involves over fifty “Greatest Hits” student portfolios of fiction and poetry and about thirty papers on Frankenstein and Greek myth. At parties, our co-workers often ask us how do we avoid bringing our work home with us. The answer is: we don’t. But what is on (or under, in my case) our bedside tables enables us to at least never have to bring it into the bedroom.

Just recently, we used some gift cards from the wedding to buy not one but two nightstands. Matching! Such extravagance for someone whose most recent furniture finds (like a chartreuse velvet couch in mint condition) are a result of well-timed stops at garage sales and thrift stores. My nightstand is a lovely dark teak with a wheaten canvas basket nestled in between the legs. About every two months, the contents of the basket changes. Right now, Villanelle, our geriatric dachshund (perhaps sensing we have begun to pack for India and are about to leave her—so each moment is scrutinized even more closely than usual, which is to say: she is staring at me. Then at the basket. Then at me. Then the basket), has tucked her red snout in the basket since I have pulled it from under the nightstand. This is what she sniffs:

1. Poeta en San Francisco, by my homegirl, Barbara Jane Reyes, who just won the Laughlin Prize: tough and full o’ heart and sweat and candor, these are haunting poems that will zap you if you read them just before bed. Zap you, I say.

2. the latest issue of CutBank—a hip hip hip poetry journal from the fine folks at the Univ. of Montana.

3. Memoirs of a Sword Swallower, by Daniel Mannix—my threshold for pain stops at the odd paper cut. Perhaps that is why I am completely fascinated by this memoir of a guy who seems to have the highest tolerance for pain I’ve ever heard of and who traveled with a sideshow in the 1940s. He tells all of his secrets (well, maybe not all) with such precision that you will never look at your kitchen knives in the same way. Yipes.

4. the latest brochure of Ladera (www.ladera.com), the “green” resort in St. Lucia where we honeymooned last June. Ah, Ladera. The resort is such that each room is situated on the side of a mountain so the fourth wall is completely missing and you have a floor-to-ceiling view of the Piton mountains (that Derek Wolcott so elegantly painted in Omeros). With visits from the occasional honeycreeper or bananaquit bird. Right there. In your room.

5. The Far Mosque, by Kazim Ali—lush honeypoems. Dream-like and full of sadness. Dream-like and lovely.

6. What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, by Camille Dungy—girl hits it out of the park with the title alone. I got this long-awaited book at AWP (along with a nifty candy bar from Red Hen Press) and have been dipping into the poems ever since. The candy bar didn’t even make it home.

7. Dirt and All its Dense Labor, by Gabriel Welsch—okay, full disclosure here. This poet’s daughter was the flower girl at my wedding. But these poems (written by a former garden designer and nurseryman) make me want to slip on my gardening gloves—no—forget about gardening gloves entirely—and get my hands down deep in the vermiculite and topsoil.

8. Duties of the Spirit, by Patricia Fargnoli—There is a poem called “Pistachios,” in here that is so chewy and crunchy worth the whole price of the book and this whole collection is the perfect summertime reading with a icy glass o’ lemonade.

9. The Private Life of Plants, by David Attenborough—this hardcover book is full of creepy and wonderful tidbits like how plants can move themselves and its full of color photographs featuring lacy orange patterns of fungi, the ghost orchid, etc. The pictures will thrill and delight you, even if you don’t remotely like plants. Lush and the chatty, amiable descriptions makes you feel like summer is already here and that plant sweetleaf is already in your hand. Or that you are already in a place like south India: green, greeny, greeniest. A place where bats and banana trees thrum if you listen close enough. Exactly the place I want to be when I turn off the lights.