You used to be such a sweet boy.
What changed?

You used to tell me everything,
Ask me all your questions.
You couldn't wait to show off
Your times tables.  At age three.
Which you worked out for yourself.
What changed?

You used to climb into my lap
And rub the buzz-cut fuzz
On the back of my head.
You used to ask the barber
To cut your hair
So it was just like mine.
What changed?

You used to show me your stories,
Talk about your friends,
Tell me what was on your mind.
You used to let me point out
When you were straying
From the straight and narrow
In deed or in thought.
What changed?

You didn't used to keep to yourself,
Skulk around the house,
Stay in your room,
Use that gutter language.
I didn't used to need to drink,
Or use this belt on you.

What changed?

Kendra Stevens is a Chicago-based writer, live-lit performer, comic, and rapper (yeah, that's right). She has performed her original work with the kates and Beast Women since their inceptions, and has also been featured at Story Club (winning Audience Favorite Story December 2012), Chicago Women's Funny Festival, Essay Fiesta, and The Funny Story Show, among others. She is also one-fourth of Chicago's All-Female Beastie Boys Tribute, She's Crafty, spitting rhymes as Ken D.

Find her online at kendrastevens.com and shescraftychi.com, and on Twitter as @kendra_stevens.

Please join Kendra and all our outstanding readers on Tuesday, July 2nd, 2013, upstairs at Hopleaf at 7:30 pm. This 21-and-older event is free.

A reader writes to ask:

I have perused your formatting advice and have a question. You advise underline to indicate italics, what about bold? Make it "actual" or use asterisks, etc? I need to indicate vectors in bold for a fact article but for sci-fi geared magazine. Thanks.

The use of boldface type is rare enough (at least in the fiction world) that, back in the olden days, one had to indicate it by hand by drawing a squiggly line underneath the words to be bolded. For whatever reason, our society has adopted italics as the preferred method of emphasis, which is why underlining is a function readily available on most typewriters but undersquiggling is not.

Boldface is, however, more common in non-fiction. In cases where it may indeed be required, either by a publication's style guide or by conventions you've adopted for a specific article, I would just go ahead and use the actual bold function of your word processor. You are unlikely these days to submit a manuscript on paper, and using asterisks around the words to be bolded is likely just to result in mistakes in the final copy.

(For a larger discussion of boldface type, see my post "Testifying with Boldface.")

When I eat strawberries, I like to pretend they're the wizened hearts of my enemies. Ah, memories.