I was at the gym, finished with my workout, and so I texted Denise: “Bayou lunch?” (I cannot resist a pun.) She answered in the affirmative, swung by and picked me up in her truck, and since I was buying I picked the place: The Schoolhouse. Sitting across from her there, with her hair uncharacteristically swept away from her beautiful brow, I was struck with a thought of a single word: “Athena.” She looked like the goddess–wise, courageous, and ready to strategize a campaign. So was planted the seed of this page.

Here are the words of the triple acrostic:

Dispensing with hist’ry & like parenthetica
Embracing a mythos & sweet sentiment
Neglectful of nine facts & thrill’d by the tenth
It is most behooving & fitful, this scene
Suggestive of battle & spillage of spleen
Emboss’d on a column & set in Helvetica