Safe spaces and physical places have been heavy on my mind. Where I hold memories, hands, joy. Life is sweeter when I let it sound like a poem. There’s despair and a lot of anger if I choose to let it consume me. There are places in my head I find refuge in when the floor feels shaky, when the core of my being is panicked. Often these places are real, not just a dreamed-up comfort, and if I take a walk or a plane ride I could find it again. The physical space, that is. I could sit in my great-grandmother’s backyard. Find the debate room and play card games long after the school bell has let us out. These places are real, but in a way, it is a dream. That backyard belongs to someone else, a different class is taught in the debate room.
It’s a childhood comfort, a blanket; tattered and torn, a prop next to my wide eyes. I attach so much meaning to places. I speak of them as though they belong to me. My homeland, my island, my treehouse, mine, mine, mine. Most of all; ours. It is ours. I’m not referring to the physical place with possessiveness, and I don’t mean it with the kind of immaturity of a child on the playground unwilling to share their toys. I’m referring to the memory. The love I remember, the leftovers of it, even if there’s no trace of it in the present day. I’m speaking of heritage, of inheritance. Can this be understood? There are homelands that have meaning to my family. There are places the current version of myself will never see. There are places I’ve made into homes, that have held me through difficult times.
A few weeks ago, I was sleepy and in the backseat of a friend’s car. When I closed my eyes, I found myself on the way home from a family event, traffic lights blurry. A soft voice from the radio whispers the title of the next song. I know that someone will carry me up to my room, even when they know I’m only pretending to be asleep. All this in my imagination. I walked to my bed, turned on my diffuser, turned off my own light. In the backseat of that car, though, I felt taken care of. It’s not something I quite know how to explain. I was watched over, I was cared for. The night was over, the clanging dominoes an echo, the goodbyes cradling my tired eyes. I was living in two places at once, the details of current and past muddling in my mind.
More than anything else, writing is an extraction. I take my memories like a basket of oranges, limes, and lemons. I come back from the grocery store and it is all overflowing in my hands. I wring them dry for all that they’re worth. Juice and seeds and all, no sugar, or else as much sugar as I deem necessary. What a particular science.
There needs to be a degree of detachment from me and the memory, but not so much so that the details have blurred. Too close, and there’s no sensical link between actions, reactions, symbolism. In life, there are no connections. The ground is littered with pine needles, a deer confronts me in the woods, a leaf falls gently to the ground. A writer takes all this remarkability and imbues it with the meaning they believe it has. Which of course is different from the meaning another writer would assign.
What is important is not what has happened, but the perception of it. This might seem inherent, an obvious truth of writing, and by extension, a truth of life. Perhaps it is. But I have been struck anew recently with this reality, all the steps involved in writing something. Some realities I find difficult to put into words. These are the ones that occupy me most. My heritage, feelings of betrayal, of happiness and belonging. These poems are difficult to perfect, to even know where to begin. It matters to me, it all does. But how to show that.
I’ve been thinking about this quote from an interview with Jorie Graham on the Paris Review,
“A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.” -Jorie Graham
It is difficult to be honest in my writing because recently I’ve had trouble being honest with myself. What does it all mean? Why does it matter? I ask myself these questions and recently my knee-jerk reaction is towards an inauthentic, pretty-sounding metaphor. The truth isn’t always pretty, and neither is poetry. But what is the truth? Is my version of it accurate, or fair? Is this the same question?
The two-year anniversary of ‘a complete work in progress’ recently passed. This year’s milestone felt strange. I re-read the collection for the first time in a year. My confessions are dulled by time. I thought I had laid myself bare, but re-reading the poems, I view them more with objectivity than with shame. I think the value in them is that at some point, I was confessing truths that were relevant to that time in my life. I was confessing, but it is all still a private story. The poem reveals what it must, the poet cherry-picks. In the end, it’s not mine anymore, it’s not yours. It belongs to 15-year-old me, to 17-year-old me. It belongs to her staring at her pages and pages of edits, red pen in hand. It is her confession, her private story. It doesn’t belong to me anymore, it’s all hers. The anniversary passes, and I celebrate her victory. It is separate from me.
Writing about this milestone is an extraction in and of itself. I decide what matters. I still wrote that book, all idealism about separate versions of myself aside. I carefully take my vials and pipettes, wearing a poet’s lab gear (probably a bleeding pen, scratched up notebook, thrifted sweater). The whole thing is about aesthetics as much as it about results.
I’m currently editing my chapbook, which is another reason I’ve been so thoughtful about my duty to myself as a poet. I crave confession. I think there’s a lot of value in saying something just for the sake of it being the truth, no other reason than you want to speak it and never look at it again afterward.
I think I’m a lot more scared about sharing my thoughts than I used to be. It has been so long since I have prepared to put a book out into the world. I forgot that it feels like letting something go. This is closer to the truth. It mattered once and now it’s just a collection of poems.
Deciding a collection is done is once again the most difficult part of the writing process for me. It involves this weird mourning process. In thinking about this, I always return to the foreword of Savannah Brown’s poetry collection Graffiti. It was the first poetry collection I ever bought, and I was enraptured by it. It felt like this whole world had opened up to me, poetry made my thoughts become this concrete thing, a force I could hold, something to cement memory. In the foreword, Savannah Brown writes about how she published the first version of Graffiti at nineteen, the age I am now. She said that publication wasn’t something being born, it was something dying. This struck me as so profound. I hadn’t yet published my first collection but I remember thinking, yeah, it is, it’s something dying! I was reading about an emotion I would feel one day, it was relatable before I related to it. And maybe, Brown laments, she should have let Graffiti disappear, but instead she dug it up and smeared lipstick over the maggoty corpse. This is from memory, no exact quote, but I think it’s such a beautiful idea. Poetry doesn’t have to be beautiful or stand the test of time. You can smear lipstick over the maggoty corpse of a metaphor and it can be loved just the same. I’m very glad Savannah Brown did choose to let Graffiti live. I hope someone feels that way about my work someday.
I wrote the majority of this essay months ago; it’s a collection of ideas that have been floating around in my head but that I hadn’t perfected enough to publish. It still probably isn’t perfected but maybe that doesn’t matter so much.
my writing!
HAGS , Flash Fiction on Dollar Store Magazine
the last summer , Poem on Hot Pot Magazine
Fisherman and his Dog , Poem on Pomona Valley Review
Cravings , Micro CNF on Five Minutes Literary
In Mourning , Micro CNF on The Citron Review
works i love
We Go Nightswimming, a poem on Muzzle by Penny Molesso
Unearthly Planes, a poem on MudRoom by Erica Wright
Hot Soup, a poem on Split Lip by Parker Logan
Roach Slayer, CNF on 5 Minutes by Elaine Cary
October, a poem on Thimble Literary by B.A Van Sise
Ethyl Formate, a poem on The Citron Review by David B. Brather
songs
Cartwheel by Lucy Dacus
Bruise by BETWEEN FRIENDS
Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat by Del Water Gap
I’d Hate Me Too by Susannah Joffe
Back on 74 by Jungle
tiny things by Tiny Habits
The Earth is a Very Small Dot by Matt Maltese
This year is really truly the year I release an issue of this newsletter every month. I hope you stick around to see if that’s the truth. As always, thank you for making space for my words if you’ve read all this, it means the world to me. Until next time!
I often think about the duality of poetry as a confessional medium that still leaves so much room for secrecy. I always pour so much of what happened to me into it but no one will know who or what it‘s about specifically, because poetry transmits an emotional truth rather than a factual one.
Can‘t wait to see more from you in the following months!