NEPANTLA:

A JOURNAL DEDICATED TO QUEER POETS OF COLOR

EDITOR IN CHIEF

CHRISTOPHER SOTO

EDITORIAL SUPPORT

WILLIAM JOHNSON

COVER ART

Mohammed Fayaz

Welcome to Nepantla Issue #2

Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (launched annually with the Lambda

Literary Foundation) aims to preserve diversity within the queer poetry community. Our

inaugural issue reached thousands of readers and this year, in preparing for Issue Two, we have

experienced even more growth than anticipated. We added Regional Representatives and

Outreach Representatives to our team and (in turn) we received more than three times the

amount of submissions as last year. This just reminds us of the need for our journal, the need to

celebrate all of the talented QPOC poets out there!

Nepantla Issue #2 features twenty-three poets of various aesthetics, experiences, and

relationships to poetry. We also feature two interviews in this issue with QPOC poets and

activists which we admire. As an editor, I am proud of our journal’s growth, inventiveness,

accountability, and willingness to take risks. When we take risks, we have the opportunity to

fail, to learn, to become even stronger. Nepantla Issue #2 is the byproduct of collective

resilience, learned knowledge, and adaptation. Hope you enjoy the read!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page 5

Natalie Martínez

EKPHRASTIC REMAINS & ENUMERATIONS

Page 7

Julian Talamantez

in the cut

Page 8

Ife-Chudeni Oputa

Lessons on the Body: How Not to Itch

Page 9

Luis Lopez-Maldonado

TRANSvisible

Page 11

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

I Dream of Horses Eating Cops

Page 12

Jess Chen

Last Words of the Honey Bees

Page 14

Fatimah Asghar

Orphan

Page 15

Vanessa Borjon

Michoacan

Page 16

Hieu Minh Nguyen

Again, What Do I Know About Desire?

Page 17

Shane Allison

BUSCH GARDENS PHOTO

Page 18

Franny Choi

Thirst

Page 19

Nahshon Cook

Imagine

Page 20

Aziza Barnes

The Clouds Can’t Hold Shit

Page 21

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Drown

Page 22

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

If in its advance the plague begins to

fiercen

Page 23

Joshua Aiken

See Blk Boy Run

Page 24

Francisco Aragón

Unknown Distances

Page 26

Vickie Vertiz

Agua en Gotas

Page 27

andriniki mattis

how to live btwn the lines

Page 29

Samiya Bashir

Ha ha ha niggers are the worst

Page 30

L.G. Parker

I Didn’t Want To Be Good

Page 31

Nicole Mitchell

Birthday Girl

Page 32

AUREL HAIZE ODOGBO

BIRTH-MONGER

Page 34

In Conversation

Alok Vaid-Menon & Cece McDonald

Page 38

In Conversation

Carl Phillips & Rickey Laurentiis

Page 50

Contributors Note

Natalie Martínez

EKPHRASTIC REMAINS & ENUMERATIONS

for the artists, Colleen Hayward, Justyn Hedreberg, and Saya Moriyasu

Dear Reader, _____________ riots break out all the time

And reading can be like a wound

wound-up & belonging broken

That even its face is an asteroid of bones & bloom

( You would be surprised where we found homes)

Some of us have elegies that ache

Others, just cry

in ink & fissure

If, bondage were authentic, who would unwind me?

Dear Reader, what are your safe words

When black scrapes out the omission of bodies ducked down?

You remind me, the omission is always omniscient

Dear Reader, lost in the lattice of labor: Memory ::

Forms each summer that my family picked your fruit

Looking into the gaping (w)holes I see cartographers, invertebrate spirits & sacks

Of joy centered on catastrophe

Of eye-blot blue

If only there were more aches in language ::

Dear Reader, at times I

am

territorial

10 cents :: 10 cents :: 10 cents ::

My mother had a tongue

It was a pixelated grief:

cut out of

A treaty I never signed

A synthetic appropriation

In trinkets

Metis / Metis / Metis

In bodies that were not ours but stones that did seem to belong

As cathedrals, we came to the Lake

Open but exhausted

Against empires

Drinking blurred gin Floral exceeding the frame

Making fires with our corrugated mouths

And silently eating the city Until

Nothing

Was left

Shadowless

against

my stories

Julian Talamantez

in the cut

his being punished / for talking Indian.

-Cedar Sigo, ‘Prince Valiant’

person of clear salt water

warm clear deer

the mosquitoes I am

delicious to them

because of my fairy

or my indian blood

he is immune

to poison ivy

because indians dont

call it poison

utter unfaith in humanity

the leaves dont turn right

the leaves so that

they dont know how to turn right

when the guy at the bodega

complained about white ppl & gentrifications

you said me and my friend are native

I’m Suquamish, look it up

I vaporize the weed

we had for breakfast when

I come home from the poetry reading

thinking how low & how lively

we know of the cut

droppd my parasol in a ditch

pretend it didnt happen

Ife-Chudeni Oputa

Lessons on the Body: How Not to Itch

Someone you don’t know is dead,

and now here he is again,

an inching, a chigger in your side,

a midnight glazed sting.

You have learned how not to itch

ink on the underside of skin,

how not to dredge up a boy's cool-

mud hands, smaller even than your own

firm grip on his wrist, guiding,

teaching him the rules of this:

your hide, his seek;

your bare feet dusty

against the bathroom floor, flat—

not like the jagged gravel

as it shifts beneath your heals

on this afternoon much too distant

for his hands to reach.

You have learned how slow

the pulse of grief beats.

Count it out now; again,

again.

Luis Lopez-Maldonado

TRANSvisible

for Bamby and Katya

I pressed against barbed wire

as he forced himself into me

whispering in my ear,

you like that faggot?

take that shit you freak!

I lay here numb and dumb

waiting for someone to help,

chain-smoking as the sun disappears

my hip dislocated

my face bleeding

my dignity lost somewhereinbetween:

for once I’d like to do

something right,

to feel like a normal woman

to be seen as not a faggot

or a freak

but as a transwoman,

a woman.

Something squeaks in my elbow

shoulder and knee

like if a hundred hands laid on me

in me

decided I was looking for a fuck

and slipped a twenty into my purse,

but I was simply going to ask for directions.

Suddenly I am not myself:

I am back in Guadalajara, Mexico

soaking corn tortillas in hot broth

roll it up like a fat pencil

and put it in my mouth

a spoonful of squash and carrots follow,

living two lives, maybe three

and I kept going back to marihuana

and coke and liquor and prostitution,

I am back on the floor, drunk

trying to remember my name

trying to find my phone

with my black eye my broken nose

my ripped dress my broken soul.

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

I Dream Of Horses Eating Cops

i dream of horses eating cops

i have so much hope for the future

or no i don’t

who knows the sound a head makes when it is asleep

my dad was a demon but so was the white man in uniform

who harassed him for the crime of being brown

there are demons everywhere

dad said

and he was right but not in the way he meant it

the sky over san bernardino was a brilliant blue when the winds kicked in

all the fences and trash cans and smog scattered themselves

and the mountains were on fire every day

i couldn’t wait to die or be killed

my woman body trapped in a dream

i couldn’t wait to wake up

and ride off into the sunset

but there isn’t much that is new anywhere

the same violence swallows itself and produces bodies

and names for bodies

i name my body girl of my dreams

i name my body proximity

i name my body full of hope despite everything

i name my body dead girl who hasn’t died yet

i hope i come back as an elephant

i hope we all come back as animals

and eat our fill

i hope everyone gets everything they deserve

Jess X. Chen

The Last Words of the Honey Bees

Honey, our hive is built and ruled

by women. Honey, we were once wild.

Honey, look at the flowers. We raised

them into artichoke, pepper, squash,

and apple for you, Honey. You found

our hive and renamed it colony–or

a factory of Yellow, Black, and Brown

honey–we are the silent workers

who bring home your dinner,

whether or not our Honey comes home.

Home was the wild flower you pulled

out to plant your White monoculture.

Honey, we pollinate thirty acres of White

apple trees to bring home one pound

of honey, to bring home one pound

of bodies. The poison in the pollen

is poison in our colony is poison

in your children. Honey, tell me:

was your breakfast sweet? Honey,

when this colony collapses into a pool

of Yellow Black and Brown honey,

the women are always the first to go.

I close my wings and hit the ground.

I open my wings and my colony

drops dead. I close my wings

and every flower at my funeral

begins to grieve. Honey?

Who will raise the flowers

when we are gone? Honey,

do you see our queen?

She is next. And then

the Earth, and you,

Honey. Every drop

of my Yellow

Black & Brown

is falling into

a field of

White.

Honey,

I'm home.

Fatimah Asghar

Orphan

woke up alone, again.

move in day by yourself, again.

ramen and toast for dinner, again.

no thermometer for the fever, again.

too tired to go to the grocery store, again.

too hungry to leave your bed, again.

too afraid to go to the post office, again.

stayed inside, again.

remembered your parents are dead, again.

started crying in class for no reason, again.

flinched when someone said mom, again.

lied when a stranger asked where your dad

lived, again.

said he lived in pakistan, again.

said your mom lived in new york, again.

used present tense when referring to them, again.

said they are doctors, again.

said yes, they are so proud of me, again.

walked home alone, again.

ate ice cream for lunch, again.

laid in bed alone, again.

didn’t write today, again.

didn’t shower today, again.

didn’t read today, again.

couldn’t do anything today, again.

dreamt the stars fell from the sky, again.

dreamt the grass turned to fire, again.

dreamt god raked his fingers through the earth, again

saw your dad waiting at the bus stop, again.

woke up alone, again.

Vanessa Borjon

Michoacan

Who’s river, tailing into an island of moss y el coyote? Loitered origin. Whiplash. Who’s hungered

cedar and tracked pollutant? Yo regar sus entornos sin permiso. Splintered vine (milk) and half

empty pot (I bathe here). I embrace you, big mysterious fossil: scent of roses and Guadalupe.

Milkshake graffiti. I wipe my feet on an unnamed map, regionally extinct. I speak you into

memory: but already I am failing: english. My biggest cage is el idioma I was tricked into obeying.

So many thorned mispronunciations. I rebirth myself bastard without language. Unburden me.

Half-fish half-woman. In the backyard my grandfather keeps a parrot: yellow feathers clawed into

his left hand. At night the air gets so cold. My grandmother teaches me how to shoot a gun. I am

seven years old. An aguacate falls from the pinata onto my Tio Gaby’s head. I buy a quartz ring at

la plaza for four pesos. I show it off to Maruchan, a boy down the street with the affectionate

nickname for his big, rosy cheeks. He is the first boy to blush at me, although I crush on the boy

who sells the fruit and los pepinos but he goes with my cousin, Meli. Their relationship and my

enamored shyness doesn’t last long, because eventually we have to go back to America. In my

school journal I write, “We went to la plaza, I don’t think you know what that is. There are trees

trimmed into squares and lots of confetti on the ground and the air smells like chocolate and

smoke. It is not a fairytale and I am not lying!” Mojarra/oracle: do you miss me too? She asks me

how long my hair has gotten, so bright under the sun, como un chica de la playa. But with hips

like a seashell. Mojarra/oracle: bless me under your cathedral steps, save me from what I desire.

My beautiful white horse: you aren’t very soft and I regret you. Your tenacious snarl, your silver

eyelashes. Your pink underbelly. The hoof which cracks my back. I suckle on the thick, rich

marrow. I ride you as if my life depended on it. In my sleep I tie you to a tree and run away,

abandoned. Toward a fistful of flowers I run to lay in the arms of salvation. A tongue that reminds

me of the ocean: brine. To undress is to demand a surrender of my conquested history. A mouth

receives me warmly as I am colored light brown colonized-flesh. I toss my saddle out toward the

mountain and suck on an oyster of home.

Hieu Minh Nguyen

Again, What Do I Know About Desire?

Let me explain how nothing ever changes—the scenery, sure

but everything else is the same: you take off your clothes

& become nothing, but a log too wet to throw into a fire.

Ignore me. I’m still trying to figure out what it means to stay.

Us faggots are predictable this way, even when we’re here

we’re gone—let me explain again: he sticks a finger in my mouth

& asks me to take the ring off with my teeth & I do. I imagine

his wife’s naked frame: average & angry on my tongue. I roll her

around, store her in my cheek while I suck his cock. With a chisel

she make a statue from each tooth. Here, a dolphin. Here

a strange bird—I want to be a bird, or forgiven. It’s all

very predictable. You walk into the field expecting to be

devoured & then you are. The moon, a paper plate thinning

from your sopping shape. It’s all very boring, really. It ends

how it begins: a man holds out his hand & you empty

the contents of your ordinary mouth.

Shane Allison

BUSCH GARDENS PHOTO

I was so fat in this picture.

The flip-flops hurt between my toes.

I hated that yellow shirt, but loved those shorts.

Now I hate those shorts.

I’ve put on more weight since then.

Couldn’t have been any more than fifteen in this picture.

It was so hot that day.

I don’t know what kinds of flowers those were.

My thighs are huge.

I have flat feet.

Today, I would never wear open toe sandals.

My sister was so young then.

We used to be so close.

I was very protective of her.

That’s a box of camera film in my hand.

There weren’t any pockets on those shorts.

The buttons on that shirt were rubber.

My hair grew back.

I can’t believe how fat I was. Even then.

I couldn’t’ wear cool clothes like other teenagers.

I would have done anything for a pair of penny loafers.

I had fat arms. I hate my arms.

It was the early nineties.

This was before a bad perm took my sister’s hair out.

It was before the summer vacations ended

And all the trouble began.

Franny Choi

thirst

but i can’t stand not to be swallowed whole,

to be sunken into, wrapped in wet walls

& then broken down, & then dissolved

into someone else’s cells. to be craved so hard

i become marrow. stomach lining & tooth.

to be devoured – though not

by a man who expects a meal of me. not by a man

who plucks thighs from street corners, hungers for poultry

to cure his own smallness. those men

i want keeled over & panting on the back steps,

clawing at the screen. those men i wish desert. saltwater.

flat tire in the canyon. wandering the empty shelves

after we fruit have escaped to feast

on each other’s pulp, mouths wild & dripping,

hands sticky til we’re slick pits, stripped

& sated & ready to return to the soil, ready

to grow our new bodies.

Nahshon Cook

Imagine

imagine

going to church

and experiencing

the sky

and the water

and the earth

coming

together

all at once

inside you

while you

sit in a pew

and listen

to the preacher

preach

the beginning

of the beginning

again

that’s what

having

an orgasm

is like for me

Aziza Barnes

THE CLOUDS CAN’T HOLD SHIT

I understand forgiveness, but I have no current desire. When I'm at home, I sleep in the same bed

since I was 8. Same fibers in the mattress. I can’t smell her, she came before my parents bought

the bed, princess beds, as they were advertised.

If you lift the body or liberate the body, it don’t matter if you think about their

product, the product of them, if you think about them in terms of multiplication &

residual, what's left over from their last time touched, by whom.

The grass on our front lawn is brown as I but we still get it cut. I heard there’s a

drought, but I haven’t seen any dead, so we won't do anything in the remembrance

of anything.

Dream the worst ends in that bed. A white guy in a wool coat in the summer

shoots me in the kidneys, that kind of thing,

where everyone in my dream is actually me. On occasion, I text older men that

wanting me isn’t embarrassing, it’s a choice

& we all choose even

what she did to me back in the day, & we choose & we are cruel & stupid but

when I wake up in the morning, there’s a sun & a ritual I didn’t lose anything.

Everyone was alive.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Drown

After Brenda Hillman

Yes, we drowned, then changed our minds,

then drowned again,

because we could,

because no one would know the difference—

a leaf to its trembling

when it is no longer a leaf

but just a trembling.

We were splashing against the current,

a zipper of palms opening and closing.

We were always too busy to notice

that everything we touched

was a little bell that was a little famous.

The sun opened its curfew of music

against my back with an exasperated sigh

as I swam to shake the sounds

of your laughter off me.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

If in its advance the plague begins to fiercen

Virgil

Tomorrow you will be stung by a bee.

Tonight a cute boy lays his cock on your

Hi. You invite him to your no. You invite his cock

To no it down. And if you are not doing This. And if you are not

Doing That. What do you invite him to turn to. In?

You invite what slumber mutely passes for.

Sheet fisted into balls. The cross hatchings of your pattern

Stunned into forever shuns. Oh. So this is how

I towel throw. So tricky. Throat what little. Left of

The blithe night is the right thing you did not turn

Soon enough to hook. This mistook won’t be forgiven.

Misdeeds booked by whom? Tomorrow you will be stung

By a bee. It will kill you. You will die into

The hard pit of a date.

Joshua Aiken

See Blk Boy Run

A Proof

Consider that the blk boy fever dream is a funeral. That the pastors’ wife made sweet tea

and the boy can still taste it on his lips. Hence the funeral is not his.

Therefore the blk boy stands still. This stillness a miracle of sorts. Imagine his ten-year-old

face when his mother hears a ‘pop-pop-pop’ from downstairs late at night. Him, a jumpy

thing. Her, a carafe of tears. She whispers: baby, don’t make popcorn right now. Go to sleep.

Now say the boy is sulfurous and tormenting flames. Now say the boy has kept his nose

clean. Don’t forget, now, that the boy is black. If we take him as truth, then blk boy must

be understood as a bodily thing. A sample size. An experiment in survival.

If the blk boy wears his organs like jewels he invokes the body. He makes a statement as to

where God-has-made-him-ghost. Thus if one bears a non-asthmatic lung it follows to say he

is bearing a cross.

See the blk boy runs and leaves nothing behind. He brings with him death and eternal life

and whimpers somewhere in between. For if the boy is not to be made specter, he must

find a bunker. He must construct a breathing blk skin.

Hence death is neither what he moves toward nor from. Death is a cocoon. Death is a

melted glacier. Bearing death is another life and for this reason, blk boy lives.

Therefore if blk boy wakes up in a ditch, coated in dew, he is not bewitched: this is the work

of God. If the blk boy walks away, moving towards a dark and wet place, he has simply

conjured his limbs.

Francisco Aragón

“Unknown Distances”

Iliana Emilia Garcia, 2006-7

printed 2012, ink-jet print on canvas

Not

this deserted stretch of beach this

morning fog…

And that slick border of sand

would make a slapping sound

were I to run

barefoot

along the very edge

(the foam

on my left

receding)

as I did after school those years

four of them,

striding to the Cliff House

and back: practice.

Not

this shoreline—a kind of liquid lace

gathering at the corners

of your mouth

that Sunday you ran with me:

the starter’s pistol, mile 1,

mile 5,

veering

off at mile 10…

—The San Francisco

Marathon I finished

at fifteen. Not

this ocean’s palette—muted, barely

green: a fringe of froth

along the top dissolving

into sky, half this canvas

white

—a kind of absence.

But rather:

this human invention

—two of them—

of weathered

wood, tightly woven

for sitting.

And if you were seated on the right, in the distance

and I in the one

on the left

in the foreground,

we’d

be facing each other

We might even

speak

Vickie Vertiz

Agua en gotas

Huaraches , I’m thirsty . A timid pierna peeks around

The oilcloth mantel , and I want

My hand on her glass of water

She makes me feel like when I lift

My chin , pedacitos of brute gold will float away

I owe this much

To clay : the cántaro , a stack of pancakes ,

La olla de café

Hunger is for the chiniquil , a wormy flesh roasted

Chile rojo

He spoke to me in Spanish , so I answered in English

Sprinkled him on my black beans

Her wrists smell of white river rocks , mud ,

To filth , my nails owe

Bits of skin I mark with moons

When she comes up for air to kiss me

I can’t stop looking

At her eyeliner

So precise , a machine must have drawn it

I just have to know

That mole, su cuello doblado y exquisito

You’re a fool if you think

The answers are only in libraries , but not in me

Cae agua en gotas

How else is water supposed to fall

andriniki mattis

how to live btwn the lines

i walk this rod of a body

attracting lightning at every turn

& wonder how ceilings can put a cap

to what can be

beauty named

a fleeting thing not made for my hands

i lie a cut flower

in stems

in protest

on streets gushing with

a hydra of people

who all beg a peering into

with all that can be seen

at a minute arrival

of eyes exchanging a glance

into the heaving of inner worlds

my eyes smolder

the pelvis of my mouth

disowning the limbs of sound

brush fire at my throat

& in this life

the leaves never turn without

the shape of leaving

o to be

forcibly open

& closing

holding

each person

who ever walked

this tightrope body

my collarbone leaves space

for the tips of another’s hands

such pining

evenly carved into the body

a moon holding its circle

while appearing bitten into

a sacred hollow

& isn't this what breathing is for

i stand planted on pavement

slanting towards light

this plywood chest warped

sweetly by sun

a city

beating with peopled footsteps

the luxury of a consciousness

wearing through my skin

my spine a petrified wood

the axe comes

says my gender

does not

belong to me

this paper

body unfolding

origami this

unripe fruit devoured

of color

if this is the today that becomes everyday

then a tomorrow must be

a folded horizon

losing its crease

a bud opening

unveiling skin

a rippled ocean

earth below mined of its wick

& who am i to be treated

if land can be ruled by what it will outlive

Samiya Bashir

Ha ha ha niggers are the worst

you know like how she would lie down

in her dark cornered room with an old

movie and remember again just how

normal just everyday just cold just buck

wild casual just sidewalk crack each

smack in the face was just every day

buried in every part of speech just life

and she was just all in it you too you’d

just go ha ha ha niggers are the worst

remember and not even stop to think

about why her stomach hurt how come

she had all that pain in her side or the

side of her head why she needs new

glasses just ha ha ha niggers are the

worst and sometimes she stood big as a

house and sometimes she was a house

and the neighbors wished she’d keep

her blinds closed please wished she’d

pick up and move please but there’s so

much to lift so much to move what

she’s not allowed to say i’m lonely

what she’s not allowed to say this is

hard what she’s not allowed to say

i wish someone would hold me would

let me hold them for just one full minute

what she’s not allowed to do cry

where we can see her and laugh ha

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha niggers are

the worst remember? ha ha ha ha

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha nig-

L.G. Parker

I DIDN’T WANT TO BE GOOD

just touched / “were you trying to kill yourself?” / I didn’t / have a mouth / to say/ I wasn’t / would be a

lie / I thought / another mouth / could / fix it / she washed / my sheets / every / day / and bled / again /

a rusting / stain / between us / still / a chore / a headache / a back black / as plum / bent over / the

windowsill / have mercy / she took no / as foreplay / & ate / my yeast infection / karma is quick / &

visitation hour / drags / on / I mean / to say / I bled / too / a washcloth / hangs / limp / as me / over a

sink / & another she / is worried / any white walls / bed / sheets / thin / white / pillow / can become /

Dominion Hospital / with someone / asking / if I’m hurt / I mean / to say / she touched me / like she

knew / I didn’t / have / a mouth / to say / thank you.

Nicole Mitchell

Birthday Girl

All I want for my birthday is a bath

And a slice of cake

With the whole damn world on top.

All I want is eyes to match my father’s

And a tongue to match my mouth.

People say Chinese sounds like a spoon

Clattering down the stairs;

I’m going to swallow all the silverware in the drawer

And afterwards

I’ll bleach the bathtub.

AUREL HAIZE ODOGBO

BIRTH-MONGER

I Remember A Time When Androgynes Walked The Earth, Bones Still Brittle From Their Second

Birth — The One Of The Self That So Many Others Never Live To Conceive. Tears In My Flesh

Become Rips In Time Through Which I Seep To Remember And Reanimate The Legacies Of My

Eradicated Sisters.

Cracks In What I Recall Being The Earth Split Us Further And Further Apart.

Angels Can Be Heard Singing Over The Malleability Of The Ethereal, Or Maybe They Were

Demons Mocking The Gullibility Of New Found "Hopes." Varied Perceptions From All Around

And The Fawn Barely Making Their Way To The Ground Post-Ascension.

The One That Hovers Over That Operating Table Is Only Ever Allowed To Be You, But Does The

Same Go For The T-Section?

Labor In The Metropolis Could Lead To So Many Things: Isolation, Confrontation, Nurture,

Frenzy, Miscarriage, Abortion, Or Your Coming Into The World Stripped Of Any Remnants

Of Past-Self. Blinded By The Illusion Of Lights At The Ends Of Tunnels That Spiral And Stop At

Points In The Segment, I Fell To The Ground, Felt Around, And Allowed For My Other Senses To

See What My Eyes Could Not.

The Legion Of Natural Born Architects —The Ones Who'd Deconstructed And Reconstructed

The Given Over And Over Again Until The Hammer And Chisel Decided That This Was It -- No,

That This Was Them, The Shapeshifters Of Old That The Urban Legends Told.

Mothers Grab Their Children At The Sight Of Monsters But Also At The Sight Of People With The

Agency And Intuitiveness To Strip Their Bodies Of Anything That Won't Correspond To The

Legacy That They'll Eventually Carve Out, Their Bodies The Loop Tools. Monsters Are Those

Whom Demonstrate Attributes That Eliminate Expectations Before They Sprout From Their

Roots, Or The Father. The Seed That Gives Birth To The Aberration Plants Itself Almost To Defy

How Tall Its Offspring Would Grow To Be And How Much Of Itself The World Would Eventually

Get To See.

The Sheer Presence Of The Aura That Surged From The Fawn Cracked The Stone Platforms

Beneath Its Hooves, Brought Heat To Surrounding Air, And Made The Masses Cower At The

Ambiguity That Decorated That Body. They Found He/r And Made Sure To Erase Any Plausible

History That S/he Could've Had By Renaming He/r "Project 8" Or "The Fawn" And Shucking The

Body Of Any Remnants Of Non-Prescribed Characteristics Of Self.

Project 8 Is Activated And Sustained By Program Reanimation Which Uses The Antler

Constructed From The Hybrid Stem Cells Of The Stags Which Once Roamed Lands Native To The

Project As A Medium To Sustain The Deconstruction And The Reconstruction Of He/R Gene

Code. Incubators Often Double As Prison Cells But The Fawn Never Had A Choice Via The

Scrutinizing Gaze Of The Ones Who Had Their Own Plans For He/R Future As Well As H/Er Body

And That Would Act On These Plans With Force.

I Woke Up Shivering In The Haziest Water I'd Ever Been In, Yet I Could See Through It To Look At

My Abductor, The Silhouette Of A Tall Male Looking Back At Me. The Thread Glowed Gold And

Coalesced With My Body In The Prison Bound My Body To The Essence Of An Austag's Antler.

My Hooves, Semi-Hairy Body, And My Metatarsals Have Somehow Morphed To Fit Into An

Entirely Human Physiology. My Shapeshifting Abilities Have Seemingly Disappeared As Well

Given The Fact That I Have Breasts Now That Are Stagnant In Size, Genitals That Won't Morph

As I Will Them To, And I Can't Give Myself The Gills To Breathe In This Prison Of Mine.

I Remember Who I Was, "Aurel Haize Odogbo", Caught, A Gold Tailed Fawn Native To My

Homeland Of Arcadia.

Submission To The Fate Bestowed Upon Me Is The Acceptance Of Death And So It's Imperative

That I Find The Agency To Escape....

NEPANTLA INTERVIEWS:

Alok Vaid-Menon & CeCe McDonald

In the following interview Alok Vaid-Menon and CeCe McDonald discuss the prison industrial

complex, trans visibility, and queer liberation. Alok Vaid-Menon is a poet / activist who

performs in the poetry duo Dark Matter and works at the Audre Lorde Project in Manhattan.

CeCe McDonald is a nationally renowned activist and advocate who has brought much

attention to the lives of trans women of color, specifically those within detention facilities. Cece

was unjustly incarcerated in 2012 for defending herself against a transphobic attack. This

interview was conducted for Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color.

Hi CeCe! It’s been a few months since we were last together. How have you been? What’s on

your mind?

I haven’t been up to much. I’m still dealing with a lot of struggles around employment and stuff

like that. I’ll be starting speaking engagements again soon. I’m still working on the documentary

and planning out going back to school soon.

I remember back in February we were together right after the one year anniversary of being

liberated from prison. I was struck by hearing you talk about how you still didn’t feel free. Do

you still feel this way? What does freedom mean to you?

When I got out of prison I was overwhelmed by the support I received. Being in this

environment – where people know your name – things become normalized. You just try to

figure out how to fit in. But even when everything was going on with speaking engagements

and having my situation in pictures on the media and things like that – People did not

understand the struggles that I was still going through post-prison.

I was still on parole. Fortunately I had a parole officer that wasn’t that bad. They were

understanding. I didn’t have to deal with a lot of micro aggressions and surveillance that others

do: with people popping up and wandering around and making it harder for me for to be out in

the world. For a lot of people coming out of prison that is one of their biggest challenges — one

of the biggest causes of recidivism is parole officers that make it hard for ex-prisoners to survive

and thrive in a post-prison environment.

For me not to have to deal with that was good. I was already dealing with a lot: not having

stable living situations, not having employment, having no one wanting to rent to me because

they didn’t trust where my money was coming from. I don’t want to assume that it was because

of me being Black or trans--but I know it was. Having a Black trans woman come to you and

asking you if she could use your apartment: “We need to know who you’re working for, who

you’re working with, how you’re getting this money?” For a lot of other people it wouldn’t have

been that complicated to find a place like that to live. It caused me to be in a position where I

was spending more money than I should have. I had to live in a hotel. Without stability I was

put in a temporary place where I was just constantly worried and dealing with depression and

instability in general--which is a condition of trans women of color growing up. Not really

having much.

People think that when you are out of prison that you are free. That’s not the case. You’re

constantly going to be dealing with some form of oppression that is pushed on you on a

different scale than it is a person that doesn’t have any type of criminal background. You know I

was out and I was enjoying doing the speaking engagement and that was like my job at the

time. But I didn’t have any type of employment to fall back out when schools went out for the

holidays and for the seasons. I wasn’t making any money and I still had bills to pay — I had to

maintain living and not being able to get by. Just being a trans woman and knowing that it’s

going to be harder for me to find a job. I have endure things like going through temp services

and trying to get a job through them — a lot of time they have jobs who people who are getting

out of prison can do because they don’t do background checks — like warehouse jobs and

things that are more minimal.

How do you navigate this dissonance: On the one hand being celebrated on stages across the

country and yet still having to deal with these daily issues?

I don’t want to be a celebrity, I just want to speak about my situation. I don’t want people to

think that I’m a celebrity from me going to prison, but moreso from the activism and the work

that I’m doing. But the truth is I am still struggling — I still deal with the struggles of being a

trans woman of color in America, which is every intersection of oppression. Being a Black

person with a criminal record and all of the intersections that’s attached to that. From the

racism to the sexism to the anti-trans to the neoliberalism. Sometimes I feel like I don’t want to

even take up these spaces unless it’s for me to actually do work. I don’t want to do work with

anybody who doesn’t have any understanding or empathy for me and my sisters.

I’m definitely enthused and passionate about being an activist and doing the work that I’m

doing. I tried to get more people on board with being an activist and taking up space. What we

are fighting for — especially those of us who are fighting for on all fronts — is that we put in so

much and get little acknowledgement. From the queer women who started Black Lives Matter

and how so many of these movement leaders have gotten shit from other people who want to

attack people who have a vision that is different from theirs. People don’t want to take time to

reflect on their own point of view.

I’m very, very political. Activism is my first thing I want to do. But where are you really going to

find a job when you’re radical as fuck and want to get funded? But you don’t find jobs like that

because even with a lot of non-profits they have an order they have to follow and sometimes I

don’t want to follow. It’s a catch 22: you need employment and money to live and sustain

yourself and survive. But I feel like when you’re transitioning you have to worry how you’re

going to pay for that shit. I need my meds. People don’t understand us and how we go through

withdrawals and stuff like that. When I’m speaking about the revolution or some radical,

political, anti-colonialism, anti-racist, you know — I’m enthused about that. But it’s hard to

support my life. There aren’t spaces where people can be themselves without worrying that

they have to make money.

So in the past few years we’ve seen a lot more visibility of transgender issues in the media. I

know that you always keep it real so: What is this visibility doing?

I feel like a lot of times what people see in the media they expect to happen in real life. That’s

the subliminal brainwashing of the media in general. You look at pop culture and society and

how people pick up things and what they think is cool and what they think is not cool. It’s really

important to understand that’s a view to a very surface world with very surface topics —

there’s nothing really in-depth that you get from the media really because a lot of times people

aren’t experiencing the real lives of other people. People no longer take their time to actually

explore and get to know people and talk to people. We need visibility that’s about breaking

cycles — but people aren’t trying to break those cycles. They internalize the information that

has been taught to them for millennia. For example: the whole gay and lesbian movement was

started by and led by trans women of color? The media won’t teach you that.

Along with this increased visibility of trans issues we have seen a spike in reports of violence

against Black and Latina trans women. What do you think is happening?

I feel like when I follow the news I just get really depressed. There aren’t numbers, they are

lives!. 25 trans women have been killed in the past 2 years. I think we are hearing more about

them now because there has been more media visibility of trans women there have been more

talk about trans women. We have to talk about how this has been going on forever. Think

about all of the trans women before these past few years who were misgendered? Who were

never identified? Who were never found? No one has seen Sage Smith from Charlottesville,

Virginia. I went down there in October of last year and I’ve been knowing about her case since

I’ve been locked up. I’ve wrote about her in some of my blog posts. It was just really hard to see

that no one really give a shit about this girl. There are two big cases that happened out of

Charlottesvile where two white women went missing and the police were all over the case and

had search squads. They didn’t even put in the effort to look for Sage. We don’t know the real

numbers. 25 murdered is one too many.

What would a liberated society look like for you? What are you fighting for?

There would be no police because people are willing to take accountability for their own

actions and figure out ways of dealing with situations that don’t instantly go to violence. I’m

talking about: How do we prevent situations from becoming violent? We won’t have the police

state — this militarized police state — and the cops being able to have jurisdiction on our lives.

We would have community building. Trans women are free to live in their skin and not feel like

they have to deal with transmisogyny. Life would be so simple. People wouldn’t have to worry

about moving or missing a meal or if they’re going to have to do this or that. We will have

everything that we need. Everyone will love each other and we will smoke lots of weed.

How can people support you today?

People can go to the Free CeCe documentary and make donations to the post-production of the

movement. I really feel like this movie needs to be out in this world. People can also book me to

come and speak through my manager (abbydeasley@gmail.com). People can PayPal and

contact me at honeebea88@gmail.com so that I can continue to do my work to abolish the prison industrial complex. People can follow my new website: www.cecemcdonald.com You can

also hit me up on Facebook where my name is “Chrishaun Reed Mai’luv McDonald.”

NEPANTLA INTERVIEWS:

Rickey Laurentiis & Carl Phillips

In the following interview poets Rickey Laurentiis and Carl Phillips discuss Ferguson,

outsiderness, literary responsibility, and each other’s newest collections of poetry! Rickey

Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem

Poetry Prize, newly released from University of Pittsburgh Press. Carl Phillips is the author of

Reconnaissance, newly released from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in Summer 2015. Carl Phillips

teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, where Rickey Laurentiis completed his MFA.

Rickey Laurentiis: Before having this chance to read Reconnaissance, the last book of yours I’d

read was your second collection of essays, The Art of Daring, which I think you were finishing up

around the time I was completing my courses at Washington University. As I reread both books—

the book of poems and book of essays—I couldn’t help but notice more than a few connections

and repetitions between the two texts that were exciting to me. For instance, in the last essay

of The Art of Daring, “Foliage,” you prepare its conclusion by including the poem “The Darker

Powers,” which now virtually opens Reconnaissance as its second poem. “ Foliage,” too, is the

title of not just that essay but also a poem in your latest book. “Little Gods of Making” is the title

as well of the second essay in Daring and is also a phrase that comes up again in a poem

in Reconnaissance, and I’m sure there are other connections I haven’t yet picked up. I wonder if

you could speak a little about this. The Art of Daring, essentially, argues for—even as it

complicates—a kind of sexual and imaginative restlessness, naming it crucial to the project of the

artist, and then insists that even in the comfort/discomfort that might attend such a restlessness,

the artist must dare to move into that dark space, so to speak, both for the sake of her art and for

the chance of living a truly full life. So, I wonder if writing The Art of Daring and pushing forward

those ideas lead you more closely to the poems you’d eventually write and collect

in Reconnaissance? Did you “dare yourself” into a new kind of poem, or way at arriving at a

poem?

Carl Phillips: Those connections you notice between the two books are ones I myself only noticed

later. All of the essays in The Art of Daring—except for the very last one—were written years

before I wrote the poems of Reconnaissance. I don't believe I was daring myself to write those

poems—it's more like the way I've always connected writing—and living—to daring has made

me write the poems I do, and no doubt influences the poems I'm attracted to when I sit down to

write an essay. But, to cite an example, yes, there is a poem called "Foliage" in Reconnaissance—

it came out of a troubled incident of violence, one I don't discuss in the essays. But the more I

thought about the incident, the more I started questioning the role of daring, especially if it leads

to trouble, and that way of thinking led me to the final essay, which meditates on that subject—

hence, I called it "Foliage." And since I was quoting my own poems in that essay, and wanted to

include one that concerned power and the possible costs of it, I included "The Darker Powers,"

which appears in Recon...Other times, connections just came by accident—the phrase "Little god

of making" in a later poem is indeed the title of an early essay—but I hadn't thought that, while

writing the poem. Maybe it just shows that I have a limited handful of thoughts in my head, lol....

That title, by the way, is a phrase that Charles Rowell used, in a telephone conversation, when

he was describing what human beings are.

Okay, on to a question, a tad multi-headed, regarding your book, though this one is more general

as a starter: You may well have already found that, as a queer poet of color, it seems impossible

to avoid issues of influence and identity when people consider the writing. At this point, there's

a substantial tradition of such writing, ranging from Essex Hemphill to Audre Lorde to Cyrus

Cassells to Jericho Brown—I suppose I'm somewhere in there, myself—and then there are the

newest writers such as yourself but also Phillip Williams, Danez Smith, to name just a few...So,

I'm wondering how you see your work taking on that considerable tradition, making it new, but

also maintaining/sustaining it. You fuse sexuality and race, something in common with that

tradition, but your work stands out in certain ways that have to do with its relationship to so-

called white literary traditions, also to a particularly Southern tradition that hasn't always known

what to do with sexuality, it seems to me; you also seem to have a particular concern with history,

that of the American South. This is a sprawl of a question, but I'd love to hear what you have to

say about any of its parts....

Laurentiis: Interesting that Mr. Rowell offered that phrase to you in a conversation. Because

when I read it—both as the title of the essay, and later in the poem—it spun me right over to the

memory of reading Frank Bidart’s little chapbook, “Music Like Dirt.” I think there he puts forward

the argument that at least one “meaning” to life, human life anyway, is our insistence on and

ability to make: whether it be via the relationships we build, the children we raise, the art that

can come to speak for us. Of course, anything we make, at least as I’m seeing it, comes with a

potential threat of “overpowering” us—the story of Zeus and Cronus comes to mind, or even

Frankenstein—or, maybe it’s that it comes with the knowledge that whatever we make can very

easily take on a credible life of its own, outside us, even without us. Maybe that’s the daring part

of it, too? That we should continue to make, despite this uncomfortable knowledge?

But, anyway, that I did think of Frank Bidart seems a little bit connected to your question

regarding tradition, even though I recognize Bidart is not a man of color, though he’s queer…. I

guess it proves your point all the same that issues of influence can be “unavoidable.” But in my

life, as in my writing, I’ve tried hard not to avoid them. I think about Baldwin—when he was asked

once about being black, gay and growing up poor in Harlem—and how he said he had “hit the

jackpot.” There’s a little bit of—what?—sad irony in that statement, too, but it nevertheless

seems true. The tradition you speak of is a really fascinating intersection, one that seems to

render even the most quotidian parts of a life hyper-visible, maybe because it’s those very

quotidian parts of life that queer people of color have, historically, been denied. Very little, it

seems to me, is taken for granted in this tradition: not pain, pleasure, the future, history,

language itself…. That’s some of the things I’ve learned from all the people you’ve named,

including yourself, and one way I hope to sustain it—just to remain vigilant, and curious, almost

crudely skeptical and open to all possible ideas, if at least temporarily. But then there are ways I

hope to push the tradition further, to the extent any one person can. Even as I admire the

tendency to always question “the normal” that I find in queer writing of color, I’m also as

attracted to the sense of assured authority that, say, someone like Wallace Stevens seems to

command in his work. That’s probably a reason he even appears in my book. I guess it’s a

balancing act I’m after.

I keep returning to one poem, especially, in Reconnaissance called “Discipline.” It’s one of the

shorter ones in the book, and in some ways exemplifies the balance that I just referred to. “You

are the knife, / and you are also what the knife / has opened,” it ends—not in a question, but a

statement. And yet the “also”—or rather, the fact that “you” are not just one singular thing,

but also this—complicates the statement. Authority, yes, and yet the poem remains open, at

least to me. The simplest question for you is—how? How do you manage to do that, or is it less

of a managing and more of just the way your mind thinks? The other question, though, is why?

Would it be worth it, valid even, for a queer poet of color to outright, and with no hesitation,

command the authority that, again, someone like Stevens (or Frost, or Eliot, or Dickinson,

whoever) seems to yield, to say absolutely “This is how it is, what I know”?

Phillips: For me, to say "you are the knife and you are also what the knife has opened" is in fact

a statement of absolute authority—absolute, and authentic, I would add. The problem with the

authority of such figures as Stevens, whom you mention, is that there's no apparent uncertainty,

hence no hint of either vulnerability or culpability. That's a particularly 'white' stance of a certain

generation in particular, one that's never had to imagine being called into question about

anything. I believe the only thing that makes authority credible is the facing up to the fact that

all knowing is slippery, and irresolvable. By my knife statement, I think I mean that we are usually

not just the the sufferer, we are often implicated in our suffering—which is different from being

responsible for it.... In my book, anyway, I think one thing I'm investigating, in my sort of

reconnaissance of a landscape I thought I knew, is this idea of figuring out how much we want to

own, when it comes to our own flaws—not every flaw, necessarily, has to be erased or somehow

transcended or therapied away; and perhaps looking at things more squarely allows us to know

ourselves better, including those sides that some might find less attractive....

Meanwhile, I fear my question led you to think there was some need to avoid influence. What I

mean is that readers—critics—are so quick to try to pin down a writer when it comes to various

aspects of identity, sexuality, race, region, and also in terms of literary influence. I agree that

there is no reason to avoid these—it makes sense to approach and learn from them, it seems to

me. Also, so much of these things are who we are—how can we avoid ourselves, and why would

we want to? But I've seen how these aspects can also be a tool for narrowing one's identity—a

tool used by others, I mean. And I think it's challenging to sort out our own relationship to these

things and to stick with that, undisturbed by the very readers whom we at the same time hope

for, somewhere. Anyway, I will approach from another angle: what is the southern gothic, for

Rickey Laurentiis? And in particular, how does this translate into poetry, when it's been a

tradition more associated with fiction? I would argue that, in its weird way, Stevens's "Like

Decoration in a Nigger Cemetery" is a queasy southern gothic, filtered through a decidedly New

England sensibility—and then you re-envision, re-configure that poem, in your "Of the Leaves

That Have Fallen."

Laurentiis: Yeah, I see your point. I think you’re right that so much of the authority that figures

like Stevens presume they can take is inevitably bound up in their particular subjectivities—that

is, their whiteness, which seems adamant to always want to understand itself as central, and I’d

probably add, in this particular case, maleness, too. Which is why I find being a part of the specific

tradition you named earlier so fascinating and, in some real sense, powerful, as one can inevitably

see much more—can see a fuller picture—from the margins than from the center. I suppose I’m

guilty of being at times seduced by that so-called authority, even as I want to—as you have just

done—critique it, or reveal its limitations. I wasn’t conscious of it, but in retrospect I can see

that’s probably what I was up to in a poem like “Of the Leaves that Have Fallen.” Cannibalizing

Stevens’ form, literally stealing and reprinting whole lines of his poem—this seemed to give me

access, if briefly, to the kind of unquestioned, elevated tone he so often assumes . . . but it also

gave me a form to add to, even radically revise and critique his discourse, which is ultimately

most satisfying to me.

As for what the Southern Gothic means to me, well, increasingly it means more and more. The

southern landscape has always impressed, even as it’s terrified me. I hold both these

contradictory feelings as true. And, because of my experience with Hurricane Katrina, I know

firsthand that that landscape can at any moment—as if magically—be changed, erased even. So,

it’s as much a fictive as an actual landscape that’s in my mind. I also grew up reading the

landscape as written in Southern Gothic fiction: Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote

and, even though she’s from Ohio, I always want to put Toni Morrison on that list. Through them,

I came to see the Southern Gothic as a kind of imaginative crucible where all the manners of

identity (race, class, gender, body, sex, etc) intersect, in fact sometimes violently collide. You

mentioned earlier how the Southern tradition, to you, hasn’t seemed to know what to do with

sexuality, but I think in some ways I disagree. At least when it comes to this literature I’m

referencing, these books were among the first places I encountered the “outsider,” the “queer,”

the “freak,” which at least to me always seemed like codes for the sexual deviant. It’s the first

place where I saw bodies behaving differently or inconsistent with “moral” or “natural” law.

Bodies touched each other, sometimes in pleasure or violence, sometimes both. They “spooked”

each other. Some bodies even returned from the dead. All of this fascinates me and, with my

poetry, I wanted to find a way, if there was a way, to localize this into the intimate space of the

lyric poem. That’s why in one of my first poem you have a decapitated head that, incongruously,

is still thinking—and not just that, he wants to think “stranger stuff.” But, like Southern Gothic

fiction, I don’t want to float too far off into pure fantasy. I try to stay tethered: to use the gothic,

strangely unreal qualities of the genre to critique quite real issues of identity, or desire or history,

as best as I can.

You talked about your book as a reconnaissance of a landscape you thought you knew, by which

I think you mean both a kind of mental and emotional space—but there’s also a physical one.

You’ve mentioned a New England sensibility with regard to Stevens, but that also strikes me as

true for your work. Could you say more? How does that sensibility and the particular landscapes

associated with it inform or affect your work? Does a phrase like “New England Gothic” resonate

with you?

Phillips: I see what you mean about sexuality having always been there in the Southern gothic. I

think that wasn't as apparent to me—the “freak,” yes, but sexuality didn't seem the key marker,

at least in the Faulkner and Lee I read, though I now think of Blanche in Williams's Streetcar. Does

he count as Southern gothic, I wonder, given that he's from Missouri? And then there's Flannery

O'Connor, my favorite among those writers, but again sexuality is usually not the issue...Maybe

some of this is generational, too, though—I never knew "queer" to refer to anything other than

gay, homosexual, until I was maybe in my 40s. The queerness you speak of is everywhere, yes, in

the Southern gothic, I agree.

Interesting choice, to include Toni Morrison in the Southern gothic—makes sense to me. And

when you mention the talking decapitated head in the opening poem of Boy with Thorn, it makes

me remember what also occurred to me when I read it, namely the opening poem of Brigit Kelly's

book Song, where a decapitated goat head is singing. The two poems are radically different, but

I mention it in part because I can start to see Kelly as Southern gothic, as well, though she lives

in Illinois and, I think, is from Oregon. And it makes me wonder if what we're thinking of as

Southern gothic doesn't begin to seem something more peculiarly American, or are some of us

just more in conversation with a particular tradition, I don't know.

But even as I say all of this—and now I guess I'm veering toward your question for me about a

possible New England gothic—I realize that all of the things that you mention having found first

in Southern gothic literature, specially about outsiders and how their very being is in

contradiction, often violently, with traditions of what's “acceptable” behavior, all of this is

something I first discovered in Greek tragedy when I studied Classics as an undergraduate. That

was the literature that gradually led me to realize I wasn't alone in feeling somehow at odds with

an apparent “norm.” In classical literature, it's not always sexuality that's the problem, but it can

be—in Euripides's The Bacchae, for example, and of course there's Sophocles's Oedipus—more

often it's a kind of moral clashing between human instinct and societal expectation, which has

become pretty much the context for everything I've written, I think. So all of that is to say that

this notion of gothic outsiderness seems to extend beyond this country, even, though America

has the fact of slavery rippling everywhere—the enslavement of a single race, as opposed to the

differently awful slavery of the classical world, based more on xenophobia more generally....

Someone once described my poems, in a review, as decidedly un-American, more European in

sensibility—I'm not sure how to take that, but it might have to do with what I've just said about

classical influences.

When it comes to landscape, I think my answer is less interesting, or at least less

complicated. Having moved, throughout my childhood, since my father was in the military, I

never had a chance to attach to a particular landscape—not until he retired, and I was in high

school in Massachusetts. I think military kids either become nomads or they put down pretty

much unbudgeable roots as soon as they can. I can't seem to shake the New England coast, the

ocean, etc. Plus, I still have family there and visit there each year. But I've now been in Missouri

longer than I was ever anywhere, and I think a river and big sky sensibility is somewhere in the

poems, even if they themselves appear rarely. Who can say? Ultimately, I think there's a

landscape I've built up in my head, where plains meet the sea, the sea sidles around mountains—

and then there's the desert, which gets featured in one of the poems in Reconnaissance, thanks

I suppose to a brief stint in Arizona a couple years back....

Can we think of form as landscape? There's so much formal range in Boy with Thorn, from the

form you take from Stevens for "Of the Leaves That Have Fallen," to the seemingly free form of

"Little Song," where the end words of each line end of forming a whispered, rather sensual

prayer, to the call-and-response form of "Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta," to the

prose poem of "No Ararat".... And so many other forms in between. To me, they convey a certain

restlessness that is consistent with bodily restlessness and the restlessness of history, of identity,

the subjects of your meditations throughout the book. I guess my question is: what do you have

to say about form, your relationship to it, anything you'd like to say—a sprawl of a question, I

know....

Laurentiis: I would definitely count Tennessee Williams as a Southern Gothic writer. So many of

his plays, anyway, were set in the South, even if at times it was an imagined South that, perhaps,

could only really exist in his head. A drama like Suddenly, Last Summer, for instance, puts it all on

the table: set in New Orleans, lush, “exotic,” focusing on the conflict between a well-to-do,

genteel Southern matriarchal figure and her slightly more naive niece, and there’s even the

conflict between these two and the ghost of the niece’s cousin who haunts the play, at least

accusations of his homosexual exploits haunt the play…. I remember seeing the film with

Elizabeth Taylor and Katherine Hepburn when I was very little—too little to really understand

what was going on—and then it wouldn’t be until years later, at Sarah Lawrence, in one of the

LGBT courses I took, when I would see it again. I guess that’s one of the earliest moments when

I began to see the Southern Gothic in a different way—as a means of exploring, as I’ve said, all

these various manners of identity, their intersections, and the violence that sometimes attends

those crossings.

And it’s also true that I could see Brigit Kelly as a gothic poet. Though to be honest I have this

tendency to do this with much of the writing that resonates with me—to want to call it “gothic”

in its sensibilities—which likely is more of a commentary on me and my reading practices than

necessarily the text itself. But I agree with you that there’s something about this genre that

seems, at once, both quintessentially “American” (whatever really that means) even as it escapes

those national borders. Gothic, at least I’ve read up on it, is already a borrowing from European,

or specifically English, traditions. It’s just that abandoned castle of England becomes the decaying

plantation of the South; the Count becomes Boo Radley, etc. I guess when I think of “Gothic,”

writ large, I ultimately think of the kind of quadruple-helix of violence with pleasure, terror with

delight; the uncanny; the grotesquerie that is at once nauseating as it is fascinating, compelling.

And I suppose it is good literature—regardless of the particular landscape or genre—that brings

up all those seeming contradictions and paradoxes to the surface for a reader to consider. That’s,

anyway, what I’m thinking as you speak about the role of Greek tragedy in your education. And

interesting how it is these sort of reified canonical works or figures—Sophocles and Faulkner, for

example—who have led us to what I want to say are un-reified notions of the counter-normal,

outsiderness, the queer. Who would have guessed?

Form as landscape? That’s interesting. I think, with exception of “Of the Leaves that Have Fallen,”

all the forms that appear in the book came about organically, to the extent that we can call any

act of writing and subsequent revision as “organic.” I mean, I wasn’t particularly conscious of the

forms a given poem would take until about midway through—when it would already begin to

reveal something about itself, its structure or rhythms that would seem to lend itself to a given

form. It’s very much how you describe it: an act of restlessness, as well as trial-and-error. There

were many times I wrote poems thinking “Well, it’s repeating here and here in this way, so maybe

it might want to work as a villanelle” and, in the revision, I’m led to some new turn of phrase or

idea that wasn’t available before and that’s exciting, but then I would realize the form is, in fact,

suffocating now and I would break it apart or change it into something else. That’s a little bit

about how the title poem got to be how it was. I had no idea it would be sectioned and numbered

as it was, since it originally started as a very short, one-stanza poem that kept sprawling over and

outward. So I guess my relationship to form is like my relationship to the dark: as an act of

stepping into it, almost blindly and, not at least until my eyes adjust, without knowing exactly

where I’m going. That’s the fun of it, of writing and revision. I’m not sure I would care to do any

of this if not for that crucial, if sometimes agonizing, step.

Could we think about, maybe, one of the most basic of poetic “forms” for a moment: text,

preceded by title? This is actually something that’s for a long time arrested me about your work,

and which I’ve wanted to ask you about: your process of getting to, and choosing titles for your

poems. Yours run the gamut: sometimes they’ve very “straightforward” or, rather, they have

obvious connections to the text of the poem, such as the earlier mentioned “The Darker Powers.”

But other times, maybe most often, they work a bit more mysteriously, obliquely, seemingly

disconnected from the text, so that as a reader one of the first “arguments” we have to consider

and negotiate in the poem is indeed the one made between the title and text. One example might

be another short poem in the book, “Thunder;” another might be the slightly longer, “Capella”—

which as I look it up I see is the name of the brightest star in the constellation Auriga. But the

washed-up remnants of Catholic school Latin and college Italian in my head also wants me to

think it has some relation to our English word “chapel” and also some connection to those round

hats we see, for instance, Cardinals wearing. Is that right? Anyway, you could speak about those

two poems specifically, or maybe just offer some of your thoughts on your relationship to titles

and titling in general…

Phillips: Surprising and not so surprising, to me, that so-called canonical works can be the ways

into exploring our own outsiderness, queerness, uncanonicalness—I guess it's why I keep

insisting, all these years into teaching, on making sure students are aware of what happened in

literature before 1950. I've feared, sometimes, that it makes me seem conservative, directing

people to Frost, Hopkins, Wyatt, Dickinson, etc., but when I think of it, just looking at those four,

there's a lot about them that makes them outsiders. Euripides, whom I mentioned earlier, is

definitely the outsider among the other Greek tragedians.

My sense, by the way, from your poems and from having worked with you for two years, is that

we work exactly the same way, when it comes to arriving at form. Ditto, our relationship to the

dark. As if there were a difference between the dark and form. And maybe this is a loose way of

trying to answer your question about titles. My titles always come after the poem has been

written—and often it can be days, or weeks, before I have a title. As it happens, I spent much of

this morning trying to figure out a new title for a poem I finished a month ago—it had a title, but

I started feeling it was the wrong one….You are right, I prefer a title that offers the possibility of

engagement and surprise, right from the start. A title like "The Walk," if it turns out to be about

someone walking, is not only boring to me, but it seem to pass up an opportunity for more work

to get done on the page. In that sense, I think of titles as prosodic tools. On the other hand, if a

poem is called "Thunder" and it's followed by a handful of lines that seem to be excerpted

fragments of some overheard conversation, I think something more provocative occurs -- in what

way do these fragments relate to thunder? Is the thunder's dialogue what gets overheard? What

would dialogue be, for thunder? Or is thunder the title as a way of conveying a psychological and

emotional space—something about liminality, approaching storm (or being in the wake of

storm), something about threat? I like that complicatedness, and I hope for a reader who enjoys

thinking about those questions. For me, it helps the poem resonate.

But when it comes to how I arrive at the titles, I'm afraid I have nothing sophisticated to say, and

maybe a lot more frustrating instead. The titles come to me. Pretty much out of nowhere—or at

least not when I'm trying to find them. "Capella," for example—that word just came to me, and I

knew it had to be the title of my poem. I then looked it up and found out it was a star, as you

mentioned. But for me it has more to do with the phrase "a capella" in music—and yet "capella"

by itself has nothing to do with music. But I stuck with it for the title. There's an older poem of

mine, called "Sudden Scattering of Leaves, All Gold." That title came out of a dog walk at night,

one fall, when a gust of wind blew and many of the leaves of a sapling tree scattered. The title,

in those words exactly, came to me, and I ran home to write it down before I'd forget.... The truth

is, titles come to me the way poems do—I'm not able to write toward an idea, or toward a subject,

any more than I'm able to write toward the idea of a book of poems; if I thought I was writing a

book of poems and I knew what it was about, I couldn't write, which I know is contrary to how

many poets work.

Perhaps I've found a segue to the next question for you. I've just said what I've said about not

being able to write toward a given subject. And I suspect that is usually the case for you, as

well? But I notice that there are several poems in Boy with Thorn, including the title poem, that

are ekphrastic and seem to have actually been occasioned by the art object—paintings by

Basquiat, O'Keeffe, David Bailly, for example. Granted, you take the poem elsewhere, by the end,

it's not “merely” a recapturing of the visual in terms of language. So, do you work that way—

write towards the subject, knowing what it is ahead of time—often? And I wonder about this,

too, in terms of a —did you have a sense of the book for quite some time before you actually put

it together? These are considerably more practical questions, I know, but I hope of interest....

Laurentiis: When I encountered your pedagogical style—that is, to teach with some awareness

of literature pre-1950—I didn’t take it at all as conservative, especially in part because you’d

present the work without any dogged insistent on how we should be reading it. Any one of us

could perform, as I did, whatever manner of critical readings upon the text—feminist, queer,

racial, prosodic, what have you. I found it refreshing, insofar as it offered an opportunity to turn

our contemporary eyes back on history, only to sometimes discover that many of the ideas,

notions or strategies we think of as new aren’t necessarily so new after all. We’ve been speaking

a little about being or being made to feel like an outsider, but this sort of reading practice is one

of the few ways I can be made to feel a true part of something larger, even older, than me.

Maybe, in some way, I’m inching toward a response to your last question for me. Because—and

you’re right about this—while I don’t often don’t want to write toward any given subject or idea

necessarily, I do take pleasure from being in conversation with these aspects (literary or what

have you) of history. Beyond just being, if I can be most honest, completely envious of visual art

(and, by proxy, visual artists), the ekphrastic poem simply gives me opportunity to continue this

conversation. In some ways, I feel as if this question comes full circle to your first one—about

sustaining or maintaining certain traditions, adding one’s voice among the chorus and seeing

how, then, the whole melody may or may not change as result. But, back to the ekphrasis for just

a moment, “occasioned” is really the best word for the process. Because it’s only after an

encounter with the art object that the poem—really, just an idea or inkling of a poem—

“occasions” itself inside me, not unlike the situation of those autumn leaves falling around you

that you describe, which inspired your title. I understand my ekphrastic poems as the record of

the “argument” that took place between me, as viewer, and art object (whether on the museum

wall, on the computer screen or, as in the case with “Of the Leaves That Have Fallen” in both a

book of lynching photographs and a poem by Wallace Stevens). That’s really to say—and this may

be why my ekphrastic poems usually, at some point, get away from “mere” description, besides

the fact that I find merely describing an art object in a poem to be not only dull but, in some

sense, disrespectful, for the art object already exists as itself, why attempt to copy it?—Anyway,

that’s really to say that the poem is a record of an argument I’m having with myself, and whatever

the art object for me conjures or unsettles in me or drags to the surface. Sometimes that’s the

assault of capital-H History; sometimes it’s smaller, more personal memories or experiences that

reveal, just at that moment, themselves; sometimes it's entire fictions.

As for the case of the book: no, I really had no direct sense of the book that eventually

became Boy with Thorn until, well, it was already made. There were several earlier manuscript

drafts, quite radically different really—so I did have some sense that I was aiming for a book, to

write one, but I had no direct idea what it would fully concern. And I quite like that. It returns

back to our shared understandings of form and the dark. The surprise and thrill of it all is in the

not knowing where it may lead, even if that with can come uncertainty or danger.

Danger, restlessness, thrill, queerness—and I haven’t looked over what you had to say about

“Capella,” which is useful to me. Useful because it teaches me that, as writers, perhaps our

ultimate instinct is to trust ourselves, our impulses. That’s at work in your decision to, once

“Capella” came to you, to trust and use it as the title, and it’s also at work with regard to this new

poem that, it seems, your gut later told you wasn’t yet properly titled. So often writers, maybe

perhaps young writers, are frantic to find “the answers” in books, in MFA programs, even in

conversations like this one we’re having, and I say this because not very long ago I maneuvered

in this way. And yet perhaps it’s just a manner of reading as much as we can and then, after

reading, listening to ourselves. I think, though, that’s probably one of the hardest parts about

being a writer, even being a human: to listen, deeply, to our own minds, hearts, instincts—

because what if we hear something we didn’t want to know, or have been trying to deny? So

often your work mines this territory beautifully, honestly, and Reconnaissance is no exception. I

even like that choice of title: how it has military connotations, seeming to make obvious the

potential risk and destructiveness involved in this work.

My last question for you is not one I can seem to make a proper bridge for, but here it is anyway:

given that you write what could be called such personal poems, insofar as they survey that

territory I describe earlier, how do you negotiate this with, say, the more “public” news of the

world? I’m thinking about something you mentioned earlier, about how you’ve now lived in St

Louis the longest you’ve lived anywhere, St Louis which only a year ago exploded with regard to

Ferguson, the murder of Michael Brown and the subsequent #BlackLivesMatter movement. I’m

not going to ask if any of that has implications on you or your work because I’m sure, even if

subconsciously, it does. It certainly has on me, for how do I escape these threats of erasure?

Anyway, I wonder how you filter this news, these times we’re in, that particular noise, while also

listening to yourself—in your poems? A giant question, maybe an impossible one, but anything

you’d have to say I’m sure would be enlightening….

Phillips: What you say about writing honestly from our hearts, minds, instincts as a writer, in

particular—may be the very bridge we need for getting to your question about Ferguson, the

relationship between the personal world of my poems and the public events that are, of course,

part of my personal life, too. So many angles from which to approach this subject! You're right,

Ferguson and all of the events that have emerged from and/or come to light around it -- these

have necessarily affected me; but where, for many, these events seem to have been a revelation,

for me they have been a reinforcement of what I've known all my life, not least of all because of

having been born pre-Civil Rights, and to a bi-racial (black, white) couple who were sometimes

denied the right to travel together, were refused housing, and married in a time when their

marriage was illegal in many states. Meanwhile, in my time here in St. Louis, I've been stopped

at least three times and asked for proof that I owned the car I was driving -- in each case, I have

no doubt that the issue was my being black; and in each case, as soon as I showed a Washington

University ID, I received apologies and was told that I was of course not "the type" they were

worried about —all kinds of problems, right there....

How any of that has found its way into my poetry is difficult to say, or to say easily. For starters,

I do believe that poetry is ultimately not a transcription of experience but a transformation of

it—that's at least what it is, for me. I don't expect that I'm going to end up writing poems that

speak directly to the events of Ferguson in such a way that Ferguson itself appears in the poem,

or racial injustice is specifically addressed—that's not the kind of poet that I am and, going back

to what you said about trusting our instincts, I have long ago known that I'm more a poet who

tries to get at the psychological and emotional textures of a life without grounding them in

specifics of particular events in the news. I've never written a 9/11 poem, in that sense, if what's

meant is a poem that actually describes the events of that day and meditates on the

meaning/meaninglessness of it all—and yet, I believe that every poem I've written since that day

is necessarily filtered through the lens of that event and my experience of it; maybe it comes

across in terms of how I address fragility, or vulnerability, or assumptions we once had about

what was and wasn't possible, hard to say.

Getting back to Ferguson, what I notice more isn't how the events there have filtered into my

work, but how certain things I've long investigated have turned out to be large points of

discussion for the #BlackLivesMatter movement and for people, generally, when addressing race

right now. Specifically, from the start I've been concerned with the body—how we conduct it,

vs. how we're told we should conduct it; and once we get into being told how to conduct it, that

raises the other issue I've long been concerned with, namely power, who gets to hold it, what

the responsibilities are of holding it, who doesn't get to hold it, how —if at all—can power be

handled with something like fluidity, within an intimate relationship, but also within the

relationship between the personal and the public spheres, one's own body and—again—the

society that thinks to dictate how that body should be handled. Granted, when I've spoken of the

body, it's largely been in the sexual arena, and that's the same with power. But I feel very much

in conversation, at the same time, with what's being said lately about the black body, about police

as the manifestation of societally endorsed power, and about the tensions that result when the

body, the black body in particular, resists the restraints being imposed by those in

power. Somewhere in all of this, there's a related fear of otherness, be it in terms of color, as

here, or by extension in terms of sex, gender—we're back to queerness, I suppose. I like to think

that what I'm writing resonates, at the psychological and emotional level, with what has been

happening in terms of Ferguson and the conversations around it. I think the most honest thing I

can do, and still be true to the only poet I can ultimately be, is to record my version of how it

feels to be alive right now, in this climate. There are other versions, and we need all of them, in

order to see and feel clearly, accurately, the times we live in, and to be able to ask questions

accordingly. Certainly I'm writing the only poems I can write. So, to get back to the original

question, I don't feel that I'm filtering the news of Ferguson, while also listening to myself in

poems—I think it all gets mixed together, who I am has been filtered through the events of

Ferguson, largely in ways that I'm sure I'm not aware of; Ferguson becomes yet another lens of

experience through which I can't help but see the world around me differently. And, interestingly,

to me, those poems that I wrote before Ferguson happened now read differently to me, nuanced

as they now are by events that they weren't originally intended to speak to.

Laurentiis: You’re right. The question of Ferguson can be approached via so many angles and

avenues, it’s that “pregnant” of a—what? Image? Symbol? Event? As you respond, I’m recalling

the opening lines of one other poem in Reconnaissance that suppose “what if suffering is in fact

for nothing— / no particular wisdom after, blooming flower-like, / blood in the water?” It’s a

scary proposition, at least a bit unnerving. A reversal of the time-worn (Greek? Christian?

Egyptian?) notion that, eventually, through tribulation will come some new, better, earned

knowledge. You could apply these lines to almost any situation—major or local—but now I’m

thinking about what you’ve said about how it all—Ferguson, the policing and killing of black

bodies, the reinforcement, as opposed to new revelation, of these notions of power—about how

it all gets mixed up in you, probably in no discernible or conscious way, but in such a way that

these three-and-a-half lines, at least for me, can’t be totally divorced from the situation in

Ferguson and Baltimore and America in general. And as I said, it’s scary. What if all this suffering—

and I hear I specifically mean that stricken upon the black body—is for nothing, leads to nothing,

no salvation or redemption in the end? What then?

I think I share a lot of your feelings regarding how one’s poems come about in times like these,

which even as I say that I recognize are not so quite unlike times before our own except that

maybe we’re more easily bombarded with viral images of these tragedies, recreating these

deaths in some sense. Anyway, I don’t think I ever set to write a poem that is very directly related

to certain events, though I would also be lying if I said I didn’t have a voice in my head insisting

that, somehow, a part of my duty is to regard those events in some way. It may be like how I’ve

said form, in general, slowly comes to take hold of a particular poem—it’s not a deliberate

decision from the onset, but eventually may reveal itself. Ultimately, I agree with you: I recognize

that simply being—and that runs the gamut of emotions from joy to frustration to sadness to

pride—I recognize simply being in this world, writing as a gay, black poet, is in some sense still

revolutionary in itself. And I recognize that to write down what it feels like for that particular

subjectivity to live in this world is all I can do, if I’m to be, as you say, honest.

But it’s difficult to say how long before those images, those breaking news reports and court

cases and exonerations and what have you—difficult to say how long before they take a toll on

me. And the toll could be in any way: calcification, erosion of the spirit, one’s sense of hope . . .

That’s why I guess I was reminded of those lines from earlier. It’s probably why I come to poetry,

at all: not always to be comforted, but to be sometimes discomfited since, in any either case, the

sensation is yet a realization that I’m still alive, that I am matter. Maybe that’s what it means to

be a part of these communities and traditions, like the one you raised at the very beginning of

our conversation. Maybe it’s means just to be alive, and writing.

Phillips: I agree with you, it seems that it can be enough, just to be writing, if we are writing

responsibly, which is to say not divorced from what's happening, in terms of suffering, around

us. What parts we choose to speak to directly isn't always a choice, I think. The fear surrounding

the events at Ferguson and elsewhere, the sense of vulnerability, the apparent meaninglessness

of the black body, the particular conundrum I feel in being stranded as a body—half black, half

—in a kind of no-man's-land where it's difficult to gauge at any moment the difference between

acceptance and tolerance, the degree to which acceptance comes only because my body doesn't

pose, to some, as black a threat as another's: it's impossible for me to avoid feeling all of this,

incorporating it into my sensibility, not just as a poet, but as a human being. The margins that I

write from are maybe more recognizably grounded in sexual queerness than in race. But there is

no racelessness in this world. I hope that I speak to any person whose outsiderness keeps leaving

them somehow grappling. I hope my poems are a kind of grappling that they can relate to, a way

of showing that we're together in this. Your poems do the same, I believe.

Laurentiis: Yes, to write responsibly, to remain connected… I’m reminded of Baldwin, again, who

authored one of my favorite quotes related to this: "I want to be an honest man and a good

writer." There's the work.

MANY THANKS TO ALL OF OUR CONTRIBUTORS, INCLUDING:

Regional Representatives and Outreach Representatives

T'ai Freedom Ford, Tommy Pico, Arisa White, Myriam Gurba, Miguel M. Morales, L. Lamar

Wilson, Justin Phillip Reed, Ching-In Chen, Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, Shaktii.

Event Readers and Cohosts

Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop, Sibling Rivalry Press, Rickey Laurentiis, Lara Lorenzo, Amber Atiya,

Berkeley City College, ZYZZYVA, Jewelle Gomez, Yosimar Reyes, Marvin K. White, Natalia Vigil,

The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC, Red Hen Press, Ryka Aoki, Joshua Jennifer

Espinoza, Imani Tolliver, Margaret Rhee, The Loft Literary Center, Graywolf Press, Coffee House

Press, Anaïs Deal-Márquez, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Erin Sharkey, Danez

Smith.