Watching a Movie with Someone I No Longer—you fall asleep—you always have— / just as the murder happens / so i am left to fend for myself & your / body still i cannot bear to imagine myself translated / as rude & now i must / think of ways to carry a body /…
psalmodythere’s a woman sitting seiza, bare shoulders hunched and bent in the sordid kind of agony only thought up by a man and hovering there right above her, eternally suspended, a drop of blood so shocking in its red her son’s thorned crown upended and the man with scuffed shoes at the lectern reminds me…
A Community Feature with Stain’d ArtsStain’d Arts is a Denver-based, multidisciplinary, and artist-run 501(c)3 nonprofit established in 2015. Since then, Stain’d has been curating paid platforms for literary, visual, and performative artists working outside of the dominant narrative. We believe art that disrupts is art doing its best work in society. This approach asks us…
Ladies’ Night was Wednesday night. I was a teen wearing the heat like charmeuse; my rhinestone decolletage not far removed from games of Pretty Pretty Princess and Ring Pop richness. How do fifteen years look, all dressed up in patent anticipation? Rappelling from windows like Rapunzel’s lust, two girls escaped plain homes to walk toward a sequined strip. We waited outside Razzle’s, whispering Can I have your bracelet? to passersby, pilfered paper wristbands to vouch for legal age. Men said yes, smiles laced with knowing. We fixed our wrists in paper cuffs sealed with bubble gum. Tits up for the bouncer. Sheer surprise at entry. Flash of wrist to the bartender: I’ll have a Sex on the Beach, sunset-colored drink with the naughty name that felt like power on my lips. We sat steps from the ocean. Shimmying silky pony hair and laughing like chimps. Imping the cool girls, the college girls, even them, barely skirting twenty-one. Together we danced on go-go stages, hanging, small cages for the display of pretty birds like us. We already knew how to move, how to grind our diamond belt buckles against the bars. When we descended to the dancefloor, a ballroom if ever we’d known one, the men materialized in Marlboro clouds. Our lips tied in bows, we ribboned together for safety. But each hip thrust, each sip of ether, pulled us a little looser until we hung askance, stringy and stupid. We imagined it was us, holding the keys to the castles between our ears. We didn’t know better, couldn’t yet grasp the jeweled boxes of women whose hinges and clasps were broken and forced open. Force: hadn’t occurred to us yet, children plumped on American Dreams, tender foie gras goslings. When they crushed their dicks against us and corseted us in touch; squeezing and rubbing, churning and shoving, we wondered: Is this love?
The roses here are like pomegranate seeds, ruthlessly carnal and hopelessly tinged with the scent of the dead. The soil they grow in is leaden, fungicide paints each head. The flower smell is bred out in a hedge for longevity. How did this bloom that wreaths collective memory in sparking thorn and throbbing petal become mostly poison? Our apples have met a similar fate, vitamins and minerals bolting at downshot rates, revolting from the flush. Calcium, Iron, Phosphate: Bone, Blood, Soft Tissue— What greater issue? If the blocks are lost, how will our bodies build? After my vitals succumb, I will be spirit only, a scythe of the new moon. So much has already been cut away from my crooning fingers, which reach to grasp a meager scrap of fragrance, flavor, feeling. To hold those things like a yawn before thick sleep. When I go under, my wraith will rake the leaves of you, unearth the time we ate apple crumble hiding in the thicket of my grandmother’s rose bushes, that walled-up garden where the thorns cut my back and your knees and nothing bloomed but us, despite the stoniest winter.
Behind the Manna of St. Nicholas she veiled a means of escape brought by belladonna, a clear champion of beautiful women (and aren’t we all beautiful) pressed into a bottle, for ugly skin (and aren’t we all ugly). For their cheeks that bloomed with bruises, nebulae forewarning the birth and death of stars, rouged with an atmosphere of long-waves and shaking with volcanic activity, molten in rivers and canyons cracked between their ribs. These women knew the different kinds of burn: spark, rage, smolder, rain. Degrees of damage done by ravaging, ravishing lips in red, their words lined in the color of blood. The head bleeds so much, the mouth heals so fast. The throat is always covered when in public. The back of the neck exposed when in the home. Guiliana T. made a pretty bottle, named for her sake, Aqua Tofana (Storm Water). Would it soothe the skin and disappear the damage? Or could it make the water rise, take them to that deep and sleeping place, the foam lapping their lips, the sky’s eyes closing—finally offering the rest— with which the moondrunk night is blessed.
What insights did you gain about the relationship between different artistic mediums when adapting Freedom House into a solo art exhibit? How did this process influence your writing?
Well, I learned firstly that creating visual art is not easy (haha). Fun fact: I have art directed all my book covers thus far. I’m good at knowing what looks good but was not so good at making it happen with my hands before these exhibits. Regardless, I first tried painting and was making a lot of hogwash; I then tried digital collage which proved to be more successful. What helped with the transition of poems in Freedom House from the page to digital collage was reminding myself they are two separate art forms simply speaking to each other.
I’d ask myself, “What do I imagine when I read this poem?” and then recreate that with stock images I could find online. It was challenging but rewarding because I pushed myself to do something I thought I was “bad” at! Much love to Prizer Arts & Letters and the Dougherty Arts Center for being open to my ideas and giving me the space/time/resources to debut Freedom House: An Exhibition.
You’ve received numerous awards for your poetry. How do you view the role of recognition in your writing journey, and does it impact your creative process in any way?
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t keep me going. There are days I don’t feel like writing, or feel greatly bewildered by something I’m writing, or feel like I’ll never write again; it’s all par for the course.
Writing is also a profession filled with rejection. At one point, I was getting a rejection letter from a literary magazine or press at least weekly. A yes can feel like salvation when you’ve gotten a hundred nos. Every award I’ve gotten has at least fifty no’s in the shadows of it. Those yeses, alongside having good literary friends and a true passion for telling untold stories about the people I love (including myself), are the things that have really kept me returning to the desk over the past fifteen years.
You tackle many serious topics in your work yet are still able to provide a glimmer of hope for the future for Black queer and trans lives. What role does community play in your writing practice? How does it sustain or build you up?
Community is how I even started writing. I had a group of high school friends who loved going to an afterschool thing called “poetry society” and I wanted to hang out with my friends, so I started going with them. And now I’m a poet—just like that! I think you cannot be a good writer if you don’t have people— in books or IRL or in your phone—that encourage you to go harder.
Outside of friendship, I love having local open mics, reading series, literary organizations, indie bookstores, and a robust library system where I live, giving me ample opportunities to learn and listen to and read creative writing (check out my literary Austin list!).
And even outside of the literary sphere, I’m in a city where several stellar Black and queer folk like Aira Juliet, Gothess Jasmine, Tarik Daniels, Joe Anderson, and many more are making space for Black queer futurity and art. Hope and community are essential to literature and life.
Pretty does a great job at braiding poetry into various sections as well as bleeding into the prose. How has poetry inspired you to express intense, passionate emotions when talking about issues important to you?
Well, poetry is the language of the heart. I learn that from every poet I read and every poet I’m lucky enough to be friends with. We’re working in a medium that intentionally explores things previously thought of as unknowable, unsayable, and the like. I turn to poetry when I have a feeling that can’t be relayed in everyday speech; poetry inspires me to be my most honest self. So yes, I brought those impulses to Pretty, which is a book that tries to pin down many fleeting memories I have of my life—which has been marked by racism, queerphobia, domestic violence, state violence, and many other hard things, unsayable things. Life asks a lot of questions of us. In Pretty, I answer some of those with prose and poetry.
The publishing process can feel intimidating. What was that process like for you and what advice would you give to aspiring authors?
It has been beautiful in some ways (AKA: meeting really giving editors and such). It has also been degrading in others (AKA: being asked to pay fees for people to consider my work, anti-queer/anti-Black editors, etc). For this reason, it is essential you send your work to literary magazines and presses who are invested in your voice (rather than what they think you SHOULD sound like). They should also have a diverse staff, and (in my opinion) not charge you out the wazoo just to read your work. You shouldn’t be going broke trying to be a writer.
It’s also critical, vital even, to gain a literary community; you can’t write a book and expect people to come out of the crevices to support it. The literary world is a give and take thing. Many of us are doing a lot for very little pay, but we do it because we LOVE words. Make genuine connections with your local bookstores, open mic programmers, literary orgs, etc.
Do not expect people to givegivegive and you taketaketake; make yourself useful to your local community. Also, get some discipline (I say as a non-daily writer). Put time on the calendar to write, then actually write when that time comes along. Find publishing opportunities via Chill Subs or something like that. Also, when your book inevitably comes out, remember it is a privilege to make it that far. Rejoice in it.
Looking ahead, how do you envision your writing evolving in the future? Are there specific themes or projects you’re eager to explore that differ from your previous work?
Man, I hope to always be trying to surprise myself. I hope for the fun and excitement I get from writing and publishing to always outweigh the necessary confusion and unnecessary frustration. I’m currently working on two projects that I got a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts fellowship for. I’m also applying to a whole bunch of stuff. We’ll see!
here— all along the path
lead me
as if each step could do more than amplify
the silence you left for me
look— how the grass bows a slow
gravity —dislocated
footfall after
footfall after
how the river runs
to your body runs
headwaters welling from every fracture
already
i am forgetting
how to pronounce your name
my good-for-nothing tongue plumbs
your good-for-nothing mouth
—mud-choked
estuary split open with seed
those gardens that will never be
birds come with their hunger
and i let them—
because the berries are too red
because secrets are graves and i’m tired
of digging
there are other ways to make a body sacred
hoofprints measure
the width
of every field
and i follow
simple as that—
what does it matter if the dreams are wordless?
if i am visited by ghosts or if
i have become one?
for months after i dream
of sawing circles
out of ice allow myself
fall through
since i outgrew my last body
winter arrives one black bird
at a time & the snow
ghosting into my memories
no matter how
i hold them
don’t tell me it’s only october
that i have no sense of direction
each day i gather in the rafters
of every conversation
strange-voiced as a god
distrusting
the construct of god
the idea that healing is possible
if i am to make you believe in
me i must retrieve my body
walk across the water
of a crow’s eye
to find
the blackhole at its center
to learn the art of undrowning all night entranced i watch my back
undress mirror into
mirror my scarlet mole a tiny hole through
my heart there breaths fatten like wax bead onto
sheets room soft with the opposite of
candlelit where nothing
touches me
i crumble
where nothing touches me my magnetic field
erratic and weak admits all
manner of dark matter i draw back
along an involuntary muscle immune to
stillness and gravity one ear
brimming with silver one eye a field
of milkweed
i do not mean to
haunt myself but i do linger
in this disintegration loop with minutes
gathering ponds in my palms
with my face eclipsed in a shard
of dinner plate which i rise to find
moon after moon which i run from
circling wolfish
for the bitterness of my own fingers
in my mouth
Waking, I stir beneath the soft warning of another aubade slipping deep into the moist soil of my corporeal shape. Beneath the glimmer of my bedsheets, I am a dreaming animal dissatisfied with breath alone. And I still want to ride the silhouette of earnest sleep until the world returns to green. I wink and…
in a crowded room: dress to blend in. No sudden movements, no bright lipstick, bright hair. No loud laughter. You can move among others without attracting attention. Just nod and smileon a city street. Don’t make eye contact. Wear sunglasses. Never smile, or frown. Walk on the shadowed side. Learn to blend into your environment;…
Published on September 24, 2024 by June Road Press.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started Songs for the Land-Bound, but I certainly didn’t anticipate connecting so deeply to this poetry collection. In her debut, Violeta Garcia-Mendoza constructs a portrait of life the way she experiences it. In this collection, she explores the ambivalence of joy and anxiety through nature, family, and all modern life has to offer.
Through many of the poems, we discover what family means to Garcia-Mendoza, along with the many definitions of family she juggles. The past and present occasionally blur as the poet reflects on her own parents and childhood while considering her current situation as a parent. One poem, titled “A Dozen New Collective Nouns for Fathers,” expands on this theme in a wonderful and thought-evoking way by giving fathers names such as “a stable a stumble a stubble/an ambition.”
Although I am not a mother like Garcia-Mendoza, I see myself in poems that touch on being a woman poet with responsibilities. Yes, I want to say to her poems, I get it. I’ve been there. Many a day, I have found myself in front of the sink, elbow-deep in dishes, wondering if I’ll ever amount to anything, as in “Instructions for the At-Home Poet.” I’ve been the one shutting doors around the house when expecting visitors, because, really, I’m not about to put effort into cleaning the laundry room to be conceived as presentable, as Garcia-Mendoza phrases more skillfully in “Housekeeping Secrets.” “In the past sixty minutes,” Garcia-Mendoza writes, “the mother-poet/has not written a dozen lines.” Yes. Yes, to writing about the self-doubt and monotonous chores that otherwise might be brushed off or even looked down upon. Invisible burdens like these are not always taken seriously or discussed so to read great poetry that reveal and revel in these moments feels validating.
Nature is another important theme in this collection. It is intricately interlaced with other topics and subjects, and appears, in some way, in nearly every poem. Even in a poem about type 1 diabetes, nature is weaved in beautifully: “Let the pancreas’s beta cells pinecone//and crumble. Chronic the clouds. Let the blood/sugar fluctuate a flock of blackbirds.” As a suburban wildlife photographer and someone who finds comfort and awe in the natural world, Garcia-Mendoza pays close attention to flora and fauna in her work. She also gives a lot of respect to the animals she writes about. In “Frog Song,” which she dedicates to the resilience of frogs, she writes “Never mind the mud, the pondweed;/don’t apologize. Propel yourself/mouth-first into your appetites—//your every move a swish, your every cell a song swell.”
In a very human way, Garcia-Mendoza is anxious in this collection. Anxious about not being enough of a poet, mother, or wife, about the unstoppable rush of time, and that unexplained, hanging dread, among everything else there is to worry about. When she puts the baby to bed, “instead of sleeping:/set up a Google alert for how to survive a flood/and let your phone mislead you all the way/to Venice, acqua alta and a headline you misread/as A Survivor’s Guide.” But the poems do not steep in the anxiety or ignore it. Instead, there is a natural push and pull between the anxiety that comes with living, and the undeniable joy of it. As she writes, “you can’t resist/a little still life lit with grief & wonder.” Garcia-Mendoza manages to achieve an imperfect and human balance between the two without falling into one or the other.
I also loved the honesty of modern-day living in Songs for the Land-Bound. The poem, “Lockdown Minecraft” about Garcia-Mendoza son’s Minecraft village is an excellent example of this. The poem reveals a truth about the small, everyday things we do without thinking. “My son builds himself a fortress, hunkers down, forgets/the days. He asks: How strong is concrete versus clay?/What we all want to know: what barriers will keep us safe.” Her choice to confront these modern phenomena is something admirable. It feels important because poetry is meant to refashion the way we see the world, yet we don’t often find the larger digital world we interact with represented in poetry.
The use of images in Garcia-Mendoza’s poetry is something else I keep coming back to. Many of her poems host surprising, beautiful visuals that I want to shut my eyes and imagine when I stumble upon them. Who wouldn’t linger when told about a “ghost stitch sewn/illuminant over the scar,” or take a moment to fully believe “the body is a mansion meant for pacing,” or want to listen to the “dose/of ocean moving through these woods.” Her clever use of language and construction of imagery will encourage you to listen attentively, because you don’t want to miss any of it.
Though the collection is divided into six sections, with each portion focusing on a few different subjects or themes, it does not feel at all divided. The poems work cohesively together, and the major themes and ideas of the collection carry from beginning to end. Keeping this in mind, it’s worth noting the first section doesn’t stand out as much as the others. Although it functions well as an introduction, the wandering of the poems isn’t quite as effective since there isn’t any immediate connection between the individual poems. Once we move on from the section, that feeling fades away. Since the other sections allow us to learn more about who the poet is and what her life feels like with added context to some of the recurring themes and narratives, this understanding deepens as we read on. Garcia-Mendoza’s Songs for the Land-Bound was a treat to read. It covers a wide lens of subjects and themes but manages to feel concise and deliberate in the stories it tells. Nature, family, and modern life, and the anxiety and joy they stir up, take the main stage in this collection, but subtler themes complicate and broaden the reach of the poems. This is an incredible debut that poetry-lovers should be on the lookout for.
The following piece is the poetry winner of F(r)iction’s Spring 2023 literary contest.
for Ba (Dec. 10, 1927 – Aug. 22, 2021)
Though it’s hard to take them
through a grocery store – or
on a plane – or even ride
them into a conference
panel – or across your cubicle, second
home which is sometimes your first
– horses
are an excellent emotional support animal.
Watch their ears as you prattle on – attunement as if your mouth were a prairie opening–
as if your tongue were the grass of their fondest memories. In the 90s, as we traveled hills
of Kashmir on horseback, an army lathi jangled. The horse, sensitive. My father’s horse:
sensed. Horse reared & swept forth, as if it could suddenly fly, nostrils
as wings. After flying, it clattered on
the mountainside, my father –
sensitive to the rock next
to his head, sensitive
to what memories he might
have missed in mountains
to come, sensitive to this new desire
for sensation. In 2007, my grandfather burbled, a lack
of oxygen to his brain. I stroked his face as if it were
wet rock, whispered into his sensitive ears, Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.
Perhaps these sounds reminded him of his own mouth, morning
mala japa. His burbling
receded. Some years later, I discovered in truly old
Vedic rituals, priests used to repeat Shanti before
sacrificing horses. Horses are sensitive, you
know, and must be calmed before slaughter. Rituals
today must not be too sensitive. My Dada
survived. Until four years later when
he died. Two weeks ago, I asked
my father how
my 93-year-old Ba
is. “Ghoda
jevi,” he says. Today,
we are all the horses
crossing rituals as if they were nations – or
loved ones – we could visit with visas – with
visas – we too could somehow visit.
Published on February 1, 2024 by University of Notre Dame Press.
Upon discovering Jordan Pérez’s award-winning poem “Santa Tarantula,” my immediate instinct was to share it with every poetry-enthusiast I know. Pérez’s command of hypnotic alliteration and masterful weaving of technical language from the fields of arachnology, religion, and capital punishment create a haunting statement on womanhood. Her debut collection, Santa Tarantula, mirrors the themes encapsulated in its eponymous poem: the connection between women and the natural world; the oppression that occurs in Biblical narratives, patriarchal governments, and intimate relationships; and the urgent need to dismantle the legacy of silence.
Divided into three sections—”Smallmouth,” “Dissent,” and “Gospel”—Santa Tarantula guides readers on a journey of healing alongside the speaker’s search for autonomy and self-love. In the collection’s opening poem, “Smallmouth,” Pérez asserts that what is left unsaid “demands to be / known.” This becomes the central motif of Santa Tarantula, urging readers to confront uncomfortable realities. Pérez’s award-winning poem “Deadgirl” does this brilliantly through the speaker’s observation of how a brown mushroom sprouting from the soil looks like the knee of a dead girl. The rain comes and mushrooms sprout everywhere, impossible to ignore, but eventually, the mushrooms disintegrate back into the earth. Indeed, the dark underbelly haunting this collection is the way violence committed against girls is suppressed. The speaker is left with lingering silence and feels dangerously unsafe in her own girlhood, “the [same] way [she] couldn’t be sure / which house in the neighborhood held the man // who touched little girls, and so in every house / is the man who touches little girls.” The omnipresence of femicide and sexual abuse is spine-chilling and heartbreaking, yet real—this tangled web of suppressed cultural and generational trauma is the reality Pérez “demands to be / known.”
With these wounds left unhealed, the collection moves into Part II: Dissent. Women align themselves with hissing tarantulas as they warp an ode to a Cuban government that sends dissidents and marginalized citizens to work camps. Biblical women start finding ways to escape their objectified existence as fruit, “swell[ed] with sugar, / [resting] heavy in [the] unloved palms” of their God. Women starve, left empty not only due to lack of food, but by the lack of justice. However, a woman’s desire to quell her hunger does not come without consequence; in “Santa Tarantula,” women ally themselves with the tarantula once again, and both are exalted to sainthood: “Praise / the tarantula woman still alive at forty.” But sainthood rarely comes with respect during one’s lifetime: the speaker swiftly shifts from praising tarantulas to a bone-chilling directive for men who long to domesticate them: “This is how you kill a tarantula. / Cover her, and hope to God she suffocates.” Reading this line for the first time felt like a punch to the gut, and a painful reminder that women are always in danger. However, Pérez leaves a glimmer of hope in the final line: if the tarantula survives, its assailant will face consequences. Still, the speaker persists, and the final poems in this section consider different ways women successfully voice their dissent, like taking communion with open eyes.
This hope bleed into the collection’s final section, Gospel. In addition to extending the Biblical allusions, the word “gospel” urges us to think about what truths need to be shared, or even worshipped. Though an undercurrent of danger remains bubbling beneath the surface of this section, the poems overall are lighter in tone, carrying the radical power of healing, love, and freedom. In “Asymptote,” the speaker’s mother reminds her that the body is a temple, but all the speaker can think of is when “a man / is burning [a temple] in the news.” Despite this, when a man asks the speaker how she can be touched after everything she’s been through, she poignantly asserts, “I refuse / to die having not been pressed to someone / else’s heart, having not come into the fullness of myself, / having not said this is my blood. This, my body. Saying no / or yes, and liking it.” Pérez’s masterful use of enjambment in this section amplifies the speaker’s longing for autonomy: whether she refuses or accepts to be touched, the choice is hers, and hers alone.
The speaker also finds power in herself in the ghazal “I Was Named for the River of Blessings.” The ghazal, a musical form that often contemplates love, spirituality, and loss, is one of my favorite forms of poetry. Pérez chooses the words “halleluiah” and variations of the word “name” as refrains to contemplate the speaker’s origin, struggles with gendered violence, and desire to sing hymns of her female loved ones. The last couplet of a ghazal typically includes a name, usually that of the poet. Instead of explicitly providing a name, Pérez links the speaker’s growth to the Jordan River—a symbol of freedom to the Israelites escaping slavery in Egypt, and the site of many Biblical miracles and baptisms: “Bigger than I am, he touches each growing blackberry, naming / even the greenest ones. Oh, river of blessings. Oh, halleluiah, halleluiah.” These lines gorgeously portray the pure joy of healing, as the speaker experiences a symbolic baptism and flourishing rebirth.
There is much more to write about Pérez’s incredible debut, like her precise execution of form, including a subversive mixed-up sestina, a haunting reverse diminishing verse, poignant prose poems; her feminist reinterpretation of Biblical stories; and her recurring references to insect and reptilian eggs to represent the simultaneous fragility and regenerative power of womanhood. My only wish is that there were more poems in this collection exploring how the legacy of Cuban labor camps lives on in survivors, or that the poems already exploring this were more seamlessly woven into the collection. As with any themed collection, many poems explored the same motif using different forms and language, so it’s natural for the lasting impression to feel like a blended collage. Because Pérez compellingly links predominant narratives (such as those from the Bible) to the intimate struggles of women, I found myself longing for the specter of cultural trauma to linger more in my final impression of Santa Tarantula. Poems like “Mixed-Up Sestina,” “O God of Cuba,” and “Dissent,” which explore the haunting impact of an unjust government on its subjects, were some of Perez’s strongest, adding more nuance to Santa Tarantula’s project to weave a web between historical and personal traumas.
Overall, what most impressed me about Santa Tarantula is its unflinching honesty and urgency to shake its readers out of complacency. It’s a collection that not only conveys the importance of looking at the dark history humanity pushes into the shadows, but also compels us to imagine possibilities for rebirth that are grounded in radical compassion. I am surprised that Santa Tarantula is Pérez’s debut; her poetic finesse, unique use of language, and thought-provoking metaphors make this debut a poignant and unforgettable exploration of societal injustices and the resilience required to overcome them. I will never forget these poems, and I am so excited to follow Pérez’s career as a poet.
Daughters of Ma-aogrew like stalks of rice, best left to fester in pools of rainwater. Tsoy will only pluck them out, when they begin to gourd on the dirt. Flies feed on the mud burying their bulbs into the plants whose roots blister. Stalks can also thrive in the heat, swollen, until the sun wakes…