Immigration, assimilation, and trying to make it in a country – especially one where the primary language is nothing like your native tongue – can be traumatizing. But I had suspicions that there were other reasons for all the trauma.
Obviously, there’d been the Korean War where a ghastly three to four million people had been killed, and before that the callous Japanese occupation, but what exactly had taken place during these events?
I never meant to raise my own children, not all the time, anyhow. Not like this. Some days I really miss John, but really what I miss is when people could seem like whole cities instead of swamps.
"the curse of my child who you will/ bury shallow in the ground without/ a second thought"
"America has never been a racist country ……………………………………… 15%"
What does it mean to perform? I was onstage, and yet I wasn’t; I was playing to someone, and I was alone.
The food taster is fulfilled in her job in a way she knows most others are not. Something about this makes her uneasy. Something about this makes her ravenous for more.
She’d been so good at laying still. Good at being frightened. During one of her early jobs, a gig where she’d started off alive, breathing long enough to be assaulted, the man had been so careful, making an effort to talk to her between takes
The whole process was so joyful, and it always is, even when I'm writing about sad things. I think it’s joyful because the thing I’m making is actually helping me process my own experiences and perception.
Without trying, D and B are helping me understand the truth about forever—that it works both ways and travels the earth in all directions, thwarting all human attempts to move forward by going backwards.
I’m not interested in likability with characters. I am drawn to characters who are complex, contradictory, and very particular in the ways that they might exist in the world, and that they are capable of holding contradictory views. That is how I see people.
Not long before I started doing drag, I asked my friend Sai to teach me how to bind. “Sorry,” I said. “I know you’re busy. I just think I need your help.”
From my window, I watched the pool’s plastic pit return to its former glory. Only when the refurbishment was complete, the pool refilled and made usable, did I discover Cathy existed, that the dull-but-probably-well-to-do couple next door had a daughter the same age as Gretchen Lowe.
"don’t ya know i cried when you died / i say kinfolk you ain’t dead / in me you be alive awaitin ya second comin"
“Hello, old friend,” she whispered into the void. The fullness inside her swelled. She never imagined that she would have welcomed his well-armored companionship. But how different he seemed this time, a herald of harmony rather than hostility. A true friend. Oh, how good it was to see him.
"I care to understand,/ upon the backs/ of mother’s hands/ who cradle the scars of eastern sunrise,/"
Permanently installed in my mortal mind’s corner sits Mrs. Eddy, ram-rod straight on her wooden chair, dark hair pleated, expression severe, Victorian jacket battened down, white ruff protruding round neck and wrists.
Forget the original myth, its violence, its finality, your own complicity. What if--instead of dominion--this could be about tenderness?
My poetry is indeed heavily indebted to my studies in history, psychoanalysis, political economy, and critical social theory; but I find that, at times, only via poetry can I adequately express the gravity and intricacy of not just a given fact, but what I should (like to) do in light of that fact.
"I wander among abandoned houses,/ asking beggars and passersby near the rubble/ if they caught sight of a stray wish meandering around."
I still think it is essential to at least sometimes focus on aspects of Palestinian culture and heritage outside of the conflict with Zionists. Doing this shows that we are not only defined by the current suffering and brutality; it is definitely part of the Palestinian experience, but it is not all of it.
We walk straight toward the things we want or need or have to reach, leaving a wake of our longing in the bare dirt behind us. We roll our eyes at the olds’ advice to slow down, to “savor,” such corny bullshit, we’ll slow down, maybe, when we arrive.
My mother lit her first cigarette on waking. My father smoked himself to sleep at night. They smoked as we carved pumpkins, sang Christmas carols around the piano, dipped eggs into bright dye. They smoked in our bedrooms while they read aloud to my brother and me. My mother, a skillful and innovative cook, especially for the time, smoked while making dinner every night, an ashtray balanced on the back end of the stove, lighting cigarette after cigarette on the gas burners under simmering pots.
"...arms now/ berry-covered branch/ —how awfully/ they must ache."
A Gothic style is ideal for narrating the conquest of the West because it’s a horror story that continues to unfold. Horror tropes that have their roots in the Gothic are ideal mechanisms for that type of narrative.
After discovering antipodal points and remembering Australia, I immediately started digging. It made no sense to believe that I could dig through the core of the earth but it didn’t make any sense to live the way me and my family, my neighbors, were living: threatened and afraid all the time.
My doppelgänger smells like wet fur and Old Spice. Even when we’re sitting in the dry air conditioning of my Jeep Cherokee, the scent — heavy with notes of yeast and nutmeg — is overpowering.
Mirror, mirror on the wall / Look down in mercy / The wheel is fixed / In a lonely place
I adopted my father’s fears, but the fear on tap at church spoke to what felt like my native suspicions—that harm was gestating in me in the shadow of an inevitable but unpredictable cataclysm. I learned to be in constant fear of my thoughts, lest something unforgivable dash across them at the very moment of the apocalypse.
Price is a difficult artist to box-up, for those so inclined. She’s lived in Nashville, Tennessee for decades, and has both courted and been denied Music City’s trappings. A dynamic study in contrasts, she grew up in rural Illinois but sings with a southern accent; her debut album was released on maverick Jack White’s Third Man Records, hardly a Nashville industry staple (though it may be on its way); she cut a live album at historic and revered Ryman Auditorium, waltzing (and rocking) within a storied tradition.
"The doctors call me ugly,/ draw over my bone structure,/ trace the routes where the/ coral will fuse."
“But here was evidence that maybe, if this ever did happen, I wouldn’t be able to scream or run out the door. That something—fear, disbelief, paralysis—might keep me right there, in place.”
A few times, he reached for her breast, but the moment his fingers collided with the skin of her chest she involuntarily felt herself disengage in surprise, as though shocked that this should be a place his hand might be inclined to rest, to explore
Scuttling toward me with the fat pink knuckles of her claws, assembled inside the shell I’d just thrown. Her body at home in the ugliness I’d created. She was my best friend instantly. I named her Henrietta.
Lousy: a permissible way to express displeasure, even contempt, without resorting to the verboten profane. Profanity, after all, could get you sent to your room, your mouth scrubbed out with soap, or worse if the Lord’s name was taken in vain. But lousy had a strange twist to it, a little corkscrew in the language that opened a different bottle.
I have always loved creating different kinds of characters from various generations, genders, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic classes. I think it’s just a matter of doing those characters justice and treating them with empathy and compassion.
The hotel where I worked saw a pilgrimage then of portly old men with mustaches and cabbie hats, their stomachs tucked into ill-fit jeans. They came into the lobby weeping, clutching at their thinning hair like the oracle at Delphi, asking God or me or whoever else was in the room why this had to happen to those beautiful machines.
"My dad is not making it up, but art cannot/ leave freak beauties be. He will have to add more—/ a plastic bag snagged on a sapling’s ankle—"
To the best of my knowledge, unless you include women’s private photo albums or personal social media feeds, there is no Madonna with Gestational Diabetes, Madonna of the Amniocentesis, or Madonna of the IV Tower and Labor and Delivery Room. I feel kinship with these images that portray the complexities of being pregnant. They challenge the demands for silence and censorship around experiences that do not follow the prescribed, imposed narrative of a joyful and celebratory pregnancy. These images revolve around loss, distress, powerlessness, a beauty often called grotesque, and, despite all its astonishing advances, a medical system that sometimes leaves more questions than answers.
"how do you play hand games with ghosts/ expect souls to hopscotch the river styx/ let favorite toys become grave markers"
“Breathe, dawg,” I declare to one hand-length worm. Because I want everyone and everything I love to breathe.
"the only one/ whose shore has shifted, flesh expanding from one bone/ to the next. A jagged coast…"
"We run as one, staunch, impassive, each of us different, all the same: bay, roan, pinto, palomino, as many types as there are dreams imaginable but we rush as one array, jet-like above the gravely ground at horse-speed, a single panoply that thrusts forth in perpetual motion and straight pursuit, headlong into pitiless wind"
"When I spoke, I surprised myself by saying things I had been too bashful to admit to the aquifer before. I gushed. I waited for her response. The water enveloped me."
"I think art holds the power to shift and multiply perspectives, which the world desperately needs right now. Single-mindedness is dangerous. What I love about poetry in particular, is its capacity of subversion, of dissent, against ideas but also against language itself, as language and ideas are intertwined."
At age eight, you watched an episode of Full House about dieting: D.J. eats ice pops and hangs pictures of thin models on her fridge; you know this is to bring awareness to the dangers of extreme dieting, but you keep these as techniques instead.
“Don’t cut the tongue—torn
strips conform smoother to the mold.”
Sally’s dresses were too big, they swallowed us, gobbled us up, we tied the cords too tight and they left these great, swooping Xs across our bodies. The day was drawn, frigid, there were goosebumps running across our arms. But Sally wasn’t there and couldn’t say anything. Sally was dead.
The most frequent and famous of the stories sent to me wasn't about a Florida man but a Florida woman. A twenty-something former-model-turned-meth-addict, she'd been responsible for burning down a 3,500-year-old bald cypress tree which, at the time, was considered to be the oldest of its kind and the fifth oldest tree globally.
I think artists and writers are really important in terms of addressing the climate crisis. Everybody, ultimately, is important—it’s an all hands on deck kind of situation—but artists and writers have the ability to make sense of a problem that otherwise seems vast and intangible.