This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Jordi Alonso, is from Night Swim by Joan Kwon Glass, released by Diode Editions in 2022.
Elegy for my Sister’s Journals
content warning for suicide
When the policeman handed me
your journal in the evidence bag,
I left it there unread, claiming some small
victory in refusing your final words.
And when the psychic at a party claimed
to have a message for me from you,
I shook my head and said no thank you.
A year after your death I awoke to your fist,
urgent, banging against my bedroom door.
I could have opened it, could have given you
the chance to unburden yourself.
Maybe after I listened,
you would finally have left me alone.
The truth is, all of this this could just be my
strange way of taking a stand: my sister is gone
and no ghost can take her place.
Can you see me, here writing this poem
brooding in our childhood bedroom,
stuffed animals smiling stupidly from the dresser?
I’m staring unblinking at the scorched doors
the way a child does when sulking.
Keep your journal and your fist.
Instead give me the bag in which you took
your last breath, the film that lifted away
from your cheeks, cheeks I once
compared to winter apples.
Give me the last thing you laid eyes on:
vase of fake flowers on the nightstand,
your daughter’s photo on your home screen,
the window sealed shut from the inside.
Joan Kwon Glass‘ first full-length poetry collection, Night Swim, won the 2021 Diode Editions Book Contest. She is the author of the chapbooks How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy(Harbor Editions, 2022) and If Rust Can Grow on the Moon (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). In 2021 she was a runner-up for the Sundress Publications Chapbook Contest, a finalist for the Harbor Review Editor’s Prize, the Subnivean Award and the Lumiere Review Writing Contest. Joan is a graduate of Smith College and serves as Poet Laureate for the city of Milford, CT and as poetry co-editor for West Trestle Review. She has spent the past 20 years as an educator in the Connecticut public schools. Her poems have recently been published or are forthcoming in diode, The Rupture, Nelle, Rattle, Pirene’s Fountain, SWWIM, Dialogist, South Florida Poetry Journal, Honey Literary, Mom Egg, Rust + Moth, Lantern Review and many others. Joan has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Jordi Alonsoholds degrees in English literature from Kenyon College (AB ’14) Stony Brook University (MFA ’16) and the University of Missouri (PhD ’21). He is currently a Classical Studies MA student at Columbia University. Honeyvoiced, his first book, was published by XOXOX Press in 2014 and his chapbook, The Lovers’ Phrasebook, was published by Red Flag Poetry Press in 2017. His work appears in Kenyon Review Online, Banyan Review, Levure Littéraire, and other journals. Follow him on Twitter @nymphscholar or get to know his work at jordialonsopoet.com
This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Jordi Alonso, is from Night Swim by Joan Kwon Glass, released by Diode Editions in 2022.
How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy
content warning for suicide
First, crack the egg
into a sinkhole of grief.
Measure the ingredients,
then stir, until the lumps
no longer resemble bullets.
Try not to see him
standing at your side
at age six,
front teeth missing,
pulling on your sleeve
to whisper with a grin:
Auntie, please add
extra chocolate chips.
Run the electric beaters
until you can no longer hear
his voice as a toddler
or the snap and boom
of his first and last shot.
Pour the batter
onto the griddle.
While the pancakes rise,
read his suicide note again.
Try to make sense of it
and get nowhere.
Cut the pancakes
into bite-sized pieces.
Sweeten the plate
as you scream.
Joan Kwon Glass‘ first full-length poetry collection, Night Swim, won the 2021 Diode Editions Book Contest. She is the author of the chapbooks How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy(Harbor Editions, 2022) and If Rust Can Grow on the Moon (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). In 2021 she was a runner-up for the Sundress Publications Chapbook Contest, a finalist for the Harbor Review Editor’s Prize, the Subnivean Award and the Lumiere Review Writing Contest. Joan is a graduate of Smith College and serves as Poet Laureate for the city of Milford, CT and as poetry co-editor for West Trestle Review. She has spent the past 20 years as an educator in the Connecticut public schools. Her poems have recently been published or are forthcoming in diode, The Rupture, Nelle, Rattle, Pirene’s Fountain, SWWIM, Dialogist, South Florida Poetry Journal, Honey Literary, Mom Egg, Rust + Moth, Lantern Review and many others. Joan has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Jordi Alonsoholds degrees in English literature from Kenyon College (AB ’14) Stony Brook University (MFA ’16) and the University of Missouri (PhD ’21). He is currently a Classical Studies MA student at Columbia University. Honeyvoiced, his first book, was published by XOXOX Press in 2014 and his chapbook, The Lovers’ Phrasebook, was published by Red Flag Poetry Press in 2017. His work appears in Kenyon Review Online, Banyan Review, Levure Littéraire, and other journals. Follow him on Twitter @nymphscholar or get to know his work at jordialonsopoet.com
“In the distance, a gunshot” is the ending line of the first poem in Samantha Deflitch’s collection, Confluence. When a gunshot rings out, one subconsciously suspects different scenarios. Someone had a successful hunt. Someone is playing target practice. Maybe a race is starting. A disagreement between two gangs turned south. A home-invader was caught and stopped. For Samantha Deflitch, it was the sound of the beginning of deep wondering. About what it means to grow old, about the strangeness of human habit, and about why a boy she knew named John decided to take his life with a bullet. Confluenceis a beautiful and hauntingly written story where each piece can stand alone, but as the work progresses, the reader realizes each chapter builds on the last. Deflitch allows us powerful glimpses into the scenes of her life in Pittsburgh and unveils the tragic loss behind that lone, echoing gunshot.
The first poem, “Downed Birds,” introduces us to some of the recurring themes throughout the book’s entirety: birds, oranges, the time being seven-something in the evening, aging. Deflitch notices small things everywhere in the city and sees herself in unexpected places. In “Unfenced,” she sees herself in a dead frog run over in the street. In “Crossing the Hot Metal Street Bridge,” she sees herself in an old woman yelling prophecies. In “Turnpike Toll-Taker,” she sees herself in the red-ringed eyes of drivers heading west on the highway. Always in these mirror-images, Deflitch uses the repetition of “me, me!” to make it seem like she just came to the realization that she is part of the thing she observes. Deflitch studies how she compares to and fits in with miniscule details of earth, and because she notices these intricacies for a moment in time, she becomes part of something outside herself. Not only does Deflitch find herself in unique existences around her hometown, she hears herself echoed in silence and in other people’s voices, such as her mother’s and her grandmother’s in a dream. Her words remind us that everything is connected, even when we get wrapped up in our own worlds.
Even though Confluence is about Pittsburgh, readers can relate to one’s own hometown when Deflitch writes about certain gas stations she frequents, the local Macy’s department store, her father waiting for her to buckle her seat belt, Taco Bell and Christmas music. We all have our own versions of these memories. Beginning the second chapter, Deflitch uses the same line as the first poem from chapter one: “I peeled open an orange.” Maybe she expects the fruit to be different- not rotten inside this time like the last. Deflitch is navigating a city that changes each day, but also stays the same in many ways.
Deflitch’s simple statements and detailed descriptions about everyday things make one stop and ponder how strange human habits are. This is exhibited strongly in the piece “Laundromat in Irwin,” where Deflitch finds herself watching the royal wedding on loop while waiting for her wash. As she waits, she gets a sense that the air is heavy as she contemplates how she “did not graduate from anything, or get married, or find a job today”- all milestones carved by society to measure success. And yet, the pressure of these expectations seems trivial to an artist who lives with a keen awareness of mortality and its limits.
In a later chapter titled “Ohio,” Deflitch revisits many of her earlier poems with a powerful piece called “Come Out, All You Moths.” Suddenly, each small scene and memory starts forming to center around John. There is an explanation between the lines for her fascination of what it means to grow old and why she imagined herself as the elderly woman yelling prophecies in the beginning of the book: “To grow old means really nothing / because I am growing old and the dog / is growing old and my parents / are growing old and John is not – / why? Because he didn’t want to.” A simple answer to a throbbing, painful question leads to the next theme in Deflitches writing – a search for miracles.
The loneliness of a Midwestern winter is a despair I can relate to in “Giuseppe,” when Deflitch wrote that her father’s barber referred to Midwestern sunsets as “stark, sad things.” Being from Michigan, I know how little sunlight these states get from October to May, and how restless it can make a girl. As Detflitch watched a small bit of sunset from a school parking lot with bus exhaust catching the light, she concluded “other places have miracles in the night.” This idea is followed up later in “Extra Omnes,” where she begins the poem by stating “I heard you moved / to cornfields near me, or near / where I once lived before / I left to find a miracle.” It seems that Deflitch escaped her home town for a while, and met a lover somewhere on the coast. She begins referring to a woman she loved, referencing the sea, salt, and “crepuscular wonders.”
Perhaps Deflitch found a true connection away from Pittsburgh, but never quite escaped the ghost of John, who she remembers watching Pulp Fiction with, and keeps writing about him from different time frames following the tragedy. Deflitch almost seems to detach herself describing the scenes before John’s body was discovered, stating “A woman’s voice echoes. / She has called the police. / She is crying that John has gone missing. / This sort of thing happens. / Neither she nor the police yet know / that John has put a bullet in his head,” as if to try and make sense of the words herself. Deflitch is unafraid to address raw topics, and her unique voice and style choice of shorter prose is thoroughly effective in yielding emotional gut punches throughout the collection while keeping the reader hooked.
The building up and interweaving of particular objects, moments and days in Deflitch’s life tell a stirring story of loss while offering hope in the simple beauty of a girl’s life as she navigates through the mundane and holy. Throughout Confluence, Deflitch reminds us of how we all try to make sense of and come to peace with things far out of our control. She teaches us how to appreciate the lessons that come with each season of recovery and transition, and how something as innocent as peeling an orange or watching a bird can hold the depth of epiphany. The book is a welcomed reminder to cherish the people whose paths cross ours – briefly as acquaintances or coworkers, and over the course of our lives as family members, friends and lovers – for time yields to no one and everything around us will one day pass.
Emily DeYoung is a student of the world from Michigan, who travels as often as possible. She has been to over 25 countries since graduating high school, and uses the people, places, and small moments she experiences for inspiration when writing. Emily has one published poetry collection, How the Wind Calls the Restless, which won first place in the Writer’s Digest 30th Annual Self-Published Book Awards Contest last year (2021). She loves reading memoir, camping, large dogs who think they are lap-sized, and listening to classic and punk rock.
This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Jordi Alonso, is from Shade of Blue Trees by Kelly Cressio-Moeller, released by Two Sylvias Press in 2021.
Pelagic
A water / unlike any other water ~Joanna Klink
At Point Lobos, a woman mentions she nearly drowned
at Monastery Beach—some days she can still taste brine.
Pleurisy of tissue and wave: kick harder, kick harder.
Grow a third lung, line it with desire. Holdfast. Hold. Fast.
Cormorant deep-dives, belly full of pebbles. Flash your blue
throat to me! Build us a nest, carino, con posidonie e fiori.
Tie the boat in the shallows, hike through dune asters,
a clutch of bees, thick bullwhips beached on black stones.
18th century vaqueros broke mustangs along coastal bluffs, mistook
barking sea lions for wolves. Gray whale cries ghost the cove.
Sway-balanced on driftwood, a great blue heron syncs with my
shipwrecked vertigo, slow motion wingbeats carry her away.
Poseidon chases down the sun. Storm-footed chariot. Whitestarred
Hippocampi. Coffin bones hammer the seafloor gold.
In the Whaler’s Cabin, a man spoke about the sea—
how it took his boy and didn’t give him back.
Giant kelp coppers teal water, long garlands wreathe into laurel
crowns as if all Olympus is surfacing.
Kelly Cressio-Moeller is a poet and visual artist. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net, and have appeared widely in journals and at literary websites including Gargoyle, North American Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Water~Stone Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others. An associate editor at Glass Lyre Press, she lives in the Bay Area. Shade of Blue Trees from Two Sylvias Press (Finalist for the Wilder Prize) is her first poetry collection.
Jordi Alonsoholds degrees in English literature from Kenyon College (AB ’14) Stony Brook University (MFA ’16) and the University of Missouri (PhD ’21). He is currently a Classical Studies MA student at Columbia University. Honeyvoiced, his first book, was published by XOXOX Press in 2014 and his chapbook, The Lovers’ Phrasebook, was published by Red Flag Poetry Press in 2017. His work appears in Kenyon Review Online, Banyan Review, Levure Littéraire, and other journals. Follow him on Twitter @nymphscholar or get to know his work at jordialonsopoet.com
This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Jordi Alonso, is from Shade of Blue Trees by Kelly Cressio-Moeller, released by Two Sylvias Press in 2021.
Double Helix
content warning for dysphoria, body image and appearance
I am growing thick in the middle again,
an avalanche over the waistband.
Those pounds I strong-willed away,
unwelcomed back into newly upholstered
cells. A scale is unnecessary. Last summer’s
clothes now grab my breasts and thighs
with graceless but determined ardor.
My corduroys brush and spark.
Strict exceptions become the reckless rules.
The last pastry or bread slice becomes a second
or third. What am I trying to feed?
How I green-eye marvel at those women
who sit straight-backed and cross-legged in simple
chairs, effortless as their unlabored breathing.
My lumbering limbs wince and blush.
Such slender tenderness my body
has never known. Where to rest when your nest
of skin feels cold as wintergreen dusk? I think
of my parents riding under the weight
of themselves, careening down
demented diabetic roads, bread-crumbed days
spent wiped and bathed as their bodies surrender
to decades of excessive hunting and gathering.
My sleep plays hopscotch, each night falling
further from the last. I’ve lost count of the recurring
dream where a black bear, rearing full height
upon its hind legs, swings inadequate claws
at a half-hearted moon. All through these nights
of humorless stars, I hear bits of life cry out, each skating
their separate darkness: a heron’s snapped wing,
a loon’s lonely wail, my burdened bones.
Kelly Cressio-Moeller is a poet and visual artist. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net, and have appeared widely in journals and at literary websites including Gargoyle, North American Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Water~Stone Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others. An associate editor at Glass Lyre Press, she lives in the Bay Area. Shade of Blue Trees from Two Sylvias Press (Finalist for the Wilder Prize) is her first poetry collection.
Jordi Alonsoholds degrees in English literature from Kenyon College (AB ’14) Stony Brook University (MFA ’16) and the University of Missouri (PhD ’21). He is currently a Classical Studies MA student at Columbia University. Honeyvoiced, his first book, was published by XOXOX Press in 2014 and his chapbook, The Lovers’ Phrasebook, was published by Red Flag Poetry Press in 2017. His work appears in Kenyon Review Online, Banyan Review, Levure Littéraire, and other journals. Follow him on Twitter @nymphscholar or get to know his work at jordialonsopoet.com
This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Jordi Alonso, is from Shade of Blue Trees by Kelly Cressio-Moeller, released by Two Sylvias Press in 2021.
Woman in Blue Reading a Letter
after Johannes Vermeer, oil on canvas, c.1663
*
It was mid-afternoon when I arrived in Amsterdam. The flight from California fueled a headache I couldn’t shake. I checked into my hotel room, hoping a hot shower would restore me. I was slipping on my robe when I noticed the blinking red light on the room’s phone: a message from my mother to call home. Her voice was low, a strange mixture of indecision and sadness. She spoke slowly as though lowering an anchor; there had been an accident. Tommy, close as a brother, was dead: a drunk driver crossed the divider, hit him head-on, the engine in his lap. I don’t remember telling her goodbye, hanging up the phone, or getting dressed, but I rode the elevator down and walked the stone-paved streets, shellshocked under a turquoise sky.
**
At the Rijksmuseum, whose rib-vaulted portico reminded me of a Gothic crypt, bicycles sped through the passageway before I entered. Upstairs, Vermeer had a room of his own. I stepped off the hardwood floor and sank deep into blue carpet. She was on the damask wall next to The Milkmaid, illuminated by skylight glow—so small, she could fit in my suitcase. But I didn’t care about the light or the colors. I didn’t care about the woman or the news in her letter. It was the map hanging behind her. The one detail that had seemed incidental before was all I could focus on now—all those meandering lines leading to and away from home.
Kelly Cressio-Moeller is a poet and visual artist. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net, and have appeared widely in journals and at literary websites including Gargoyle, North American Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Water~Stone Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others. An associate editor at Glass Lyre Press, she lives in the Bay Area. Shade of Blue Trees from Two Sylvias Press (Finalist for the Wilder Prize) is her first poetry collection.
Jordi Alonsoholds degrees in English literature from Kenyon College (AB ’14) Stony Brook University (MFA ’16) and the University of Missouri (PhD ’21). He is currently a Classical Studies MA student at Columbia University. Honeyvoiced, his first book, was published by XOXOX Press in 2014 and his chapbook, The Lovers’ Phrasebook, was published by Red Flag Poetry Press in 2017. His work appears in Kenyon Review Online, Banyan Review, Levure Littéraire, and other journals. Follow him on Twitter @nymphscholar or get to know his work at jordialonsopoet.com
This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Jordi Alonso, is from Shade of Blue Trees by Kelly Cressio-Moeller, released by Two Sylvias Press in 2021.
Ithaka
Dear Penelope, do you now sleep among the catacombs?
Scarves of white drift over the Aegean—an altar of bottomless blue.
I have gone to the edge of the world and still cannot find you.
Even the olive trees raise their spangled limbs skyward in longing.
Mother Earth slides her abacus beads, conjures storms quick as curses.
When lightning struck, did the boat protect or beckon the bolt?
Island flowers shut their eyes only when the stars disrobe—hope and sorrow held
within the same root.
She imagines him bright-toothed and swarthy, but her husband is just sunburned
and homesick.
So many suitors holding her skeins—she’s woven a trail for her waylaid mariner,
long as his beard and her undoing.
In twenty years, she has never asked, What shall I wish for myself?
Odysseus wonders, Do I have the right to return?
Maids cast offerings to the sea: red rose petals and grape leaves—
love and wine all that remain.
Kelly Cressio-Moeller is a poet and visual artist. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net, and have appeared widely in journals and at literary websites including Gargoyle, North American Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Water~Stone Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others. An associate editor at Glass Lyre Press, she lives in the Bay Area. Shade of Blue Trees from Two Sylvias Press (Finalist for the Wilder Prize) is her first poetry collection.
Jordi Alonsoholds degrees in English literature from Kenyon College (AB ’14) Stony Brook University (MFA ’16) and the University of Missouri (PhD ’21). He is currently a Classical Studies MA student at Columbia University. Honeyvoiced, his first book, was published by XOXOX Press in 2014 and his chapbook, The Lovers’ Phrasebook, was published by Red Flag Poetry Press in 2017. His work appears in Kenyon Review Online, Banyan Review, Levure Littéraire, and other journals. Follow him on Twitter @nymphscholar or get to know his work at jordialonsopoet.com
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Marah Hoffman. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, November 20 from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/sundress with password “safta”.
Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. This generative workshop series will give you prompts, rules, obstructions, and more to write three poems in two hours. Writers will write together for thirty minutes, be invited to share new work, and then given a new set of prompts. The idea isn’t that we are writing perfect final drafts, but instead creating clay that can then be edited and turned into art later. Prose writers are also welcome to attend!
Marah Hoffman is a 2022 graduate with bachelor’s in English and Creative Writing from Lebanon Valley College and the Fall 2022 Writer in Residence at the Sundress Academy for the Arts. In college, she served as co-poetry editor of Green Blotter Literary Magazine and Sigma Tau Delta English Honors Society president. From the LVC English department, she won The Green Blotter Writer Award. She has been featured in journals including Green Blotter, LURe Journal, Oakland Arts Review, Beyond Thought, and Asterism. Now, she is discovering new literary communities and new methods of igniting creativity. She loves creative nonfiction, intertextuality, whimsicality, cats, lattes, distance running, and adding to her personal lexicon. Her favorite word changes nearly every week.
Each month we split any Xfit donations with our community partner. This month our community partner for November is Bryant’s Bridge. Bryant’s Bridge intends to provide affordable housing and a safe space for LGBTQ+ youth to prevent homelessness and promote growth in the areas of education, employment, health and mental health to develop strength of character and promote healing and independence in a world where societal structures create obstacles and hinder support systems necessary to adequately navigate the transition from youth to adulthood.
Sundress Publications is excited to announce that 2023 subscriptions are now available!
This year’s catalog includes full-length poetry collections from Heather Bartlett, Caleb Curtiss, Amanda Galvan Huynh, Tatiana Johnson-Boria, Athena Nassar, and Hannah V Warren as well as José Araguz’s debut memoir, Ruin and Want, plus a copy of our handprinted letterpress broadside from this year’s contest winner!
Subscribers receive all upcoming titles, complimentary swag, plus FREE entry into all of our 2023 Sundress contests, open reading periods, and Sundress Academy for the Arts residency applications for themselves AND a friend. That’s a $180+ value right there!
From now until the end of the year, you’ll receive not only the entire 2023 catalog but also a FREE Sundress title of your choosing along with a subscription letter suitable for wrapping if requested.
I was beyond excited to receive the honor of interviewing poet Arielle Cottingham about their new poetry collection, Machete Moon. This was my first author interview, and being the writer of a poetry collection myself, I couldn’t wait to read Cottingham’s pieces and dive deeper into the art process behind the words.
Cottingham is a well-traveled poet, but also uses their talents for performing, educating, and editing while touring. Cottingham has work published in several different journals and they also have a chapbook, Black and Ropy, with Pitt Street Poetry. In their newly released collection Machete Moon, Cottingham emphasizes their role as an immigrant and offers an unapologetic voice in an often times ignorant society. Cottingham doesn’t shy away from any topic, exhibiting strength and common sense in areas of pain and discrimination. I was also taken aback by the craft with which they blended prayer and conversation, showing language and religion as the brilliant tools or horrifying weapons each can be used as. I was eager to find out how Cottingham navigates the complex and frustrating conventionalities of the world in order to find and secure a place of creativity and individuality.
Emily DeYoung: What is the significance of the book’s title, Machete Moon?
Arielle Cottingham: As much as it is seen as a weapon, especially in the Anglosphere, the reality of the machete is that it’s an everyday tool. My first memories of being around them involved my maternal grandfather and my father pruning the rulo (plantain) trees that had sprung up like weeds in our backyard in Houston. The pruning allowed them to fruit more often, so I associated machetes with farming and feeding people until I started seeing them in heavy-handed films about Violent Brown/Black People. I know that a majority of people will see the title and assume more violence of its contents than what’s actually present, and subverting expectations—of race, gender, and my general presentation in life—is a reality I’ve come to enjoy living in.
The moon’s associations with tides and blood make it feel like it’s present in nearly all of the poems in this book, even when it’s not explicitly mentioned. Poets love the moon, and I’m no different. The alliteration between these cornerstone images sealed the deal for the title.
ED: Can you speak more about “Southern Nostalgia” and how it portrays a moment when the speaker feels the weight and ties of their ancestry colliding with modern society’s shortcomings, especially around “survivor’s guilt and imposters syndrome”?
AC: The hook for Jay-Z’s “Story of O.J.” was the starting point for this poem. Even if you’re mixed, lightskin, whatever—people still have the one drop attitude. You still feel the fear when the red and blue lights shine in your rearview. Colorism is a disease, and surviving getting pulled over in the middle of nowhere—when so many people you love wouldn’t—is a symptom of it. Of course you’re relieved, but that relief is tempered by survivor’s guilt. Code-switching lies at the heart of this piece because, to paraphrase Trevor Noah, speaking someone’s language makes them feel safe around you, even as a stranger. So often, cops skirt justice by crying that they had feared for their lives. If speaking to them in a familiar tongue will put them at ease enough to let you go with just a ticket, it’s an avenue of survival—but one that feels like a betrayal, nonetheless.
ED: There is a recurring theme of religious references and prayers laced with personal experience—how does religion play a role in the journey of finding oneself?
AC: Religion has its place in people’s lives, and the path to finding myself happened to be the one meandering out of it. Growing up in the Catholic Church means that a lot of the traditions, cadences, and prayers have taken up real estate in my brain that can never be removed—so I renovated.
ED: You craftily mix Spanish, slang, and English words in some of your poems. What is the significance of this or the intended impact on the reader?
AC: My Spanish is not what it used to be after years of living and working in predominantly white, English-speaking spaces. Mixing languages is for myself and readers who similarly struggle with a language they were once raised in—maybe a moonbeam guiding us slowly back to fluency.
ED: “Cup Runneth Over” is the shortest piece, and is written in a very raw, relatable form. What was the thought process behind this piece and how does it fit with the others? Is this piece a shifting point in some way, considering its placement in front of “Boihood”?
AC: I placed it in front of “Boihood” precisely because people menstruate regardless of their gender presentation. Menstruation interrupts your life every month, and ignoring it in a collection that’s so intensely personal would feel like a serious omission. Also, it’s shaped like a menstrual cup, y’all.
ED: “On Hurricane Season” describes your love/hate relationship with Texas. Has the way you view your birthplace continued to change over the years?
AC: I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to definitively feel one way about it. Texas is a complicated place, both horrific and ecstatically beautiful. How much I miss it fluctuates frequently.
ED: Who is “A Letter Home” addressed to?
AC: My family.
ED: Even when you traveled halfway across the world to Germany, you still found a connection to hurricane season in “And the Tide Goes Out.” Can you elaborate on the relationship?
AC: There’s a strangely European attitude to racism—that it’s a problem in the US and the UK, but other countries have solved it (they haven’t). The motif of hurricanes in this poem is a callback to an older poem that I’ve somewhat retired; the lines about history being an ocean of hurricanes repeating itself are lifted from it. Domestic work has always been split along racial and class lines. During the pandemic, I paid bills by cleaning and babysitting for wealthy white women who were astonishingly comfortable delegating their domestic work solely to women of color. They probably thought they were being generous and progressive, giving Black and Brown immigrant women/femmes jobs, never once considering that they were just playing into the ongoing normalization of BIPOC in subservient roles in their households. The half-white, half-Black person working (or being forced to work) in the house is an old story, but one that persists, even in modern Europe—they were the creators of the Middle Passage, after all.
ED: “If Not Anger Then What” came off more cryptic to me than other pieces. Would you elaborate on the meaning and inspiration behind it, including the quote before the poem?
AC: I cannot recommend Krista Franklin’s poem “Marie Says Bow Down”highly enough. It pays homage to an apocryphal story about Marie Laveau hosting a gathering of Black folks, and the mere gathering itself being enough to excite the whites into calling the cops—hence, the line quoted at the beginning. Queer spaces have a similar history of being heavily policed when people are minding their own business and living their lives, and every form of protest is slowly being legislated out of existence. Marsha P. Johnson threw a brick that paved the way to the present, and I liked the idea of that brick being part of the Yellow Brick Road that’s gotten us to where we are. We still have far to go, but throwing bricks is illegal now, which gives way to even heavier policing. If we are not allowed to feel or express our anger at being harassed and murdered for being who we are, then what?
ED: There seems to be some juxtaposition in your writing between your Texan and Afro-Latine roots. I noticed it in “Southern Nostalgia” in lines such as “the legacy sewn to my tongue louder / than any of the blackest things about me” and “he is my father John the doctor, / who hates illegal immigration, / loves my immigrant mother.” How do you navigate these contrasting backstories?
AC: I’ll have an answer when I can stop writing about it.
Texas-born, Afro-Latine poet, editor, performance artist, and educator Arielle Cottingham has toured four continents in five years, giving performances and teaching workshops across Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia. Their work explores the fluidity of intersectional identities and has appeared in multiple literary journals both online and in print. Notable performance spaces have included 48H Neukölln, the Alley Theatre, Glastonbury, the Museum of Old & New Art, and the Sydney Opera House, where they won the title of Australian National Poetry Slam Champion in 2016. Their work has been published in literary journals including Stellium Literary Journal, BOOTH, Pressure Gauge Press, and About Place Journal, and their chapbook, Black and Ropy, was published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2017. They are currently pining for falafel at their desk in Berlin.
Emily DeYoung is a student of the world from Michigan, who travels as often as possible. She has been to over 25 countries since graduating high school, and uses the people, places, and small moments she experiences for inspiration when writing. Emily has one published poetry collection, How the Wind Calls the Restless, which won first place in the Writer’s Digest 30th Annual Self-Published Book Awards Contest last year (2021). She loves reading memoir, camping, large dogs who think they are lap-sized, and listening to classic and punk rock.
