Tag: press

They Tap Me on the Shoulder and Say They are Going to Ensure My Poverty Will Erase My Last Name and My Homeland Forever (But the Smiths and the Jones Will Live On) | Ron Riekki

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Image: Moren Hsu

When I was in the military, we marched over the purple coneflower and milkweed and powderpuff and canna lily until they were dead from the war of our feet and later when they haze-crucified me I aspirated on my own vomit and saw death marching through the undergrass and he was a he and he was not as seismic as I’d come to expect and

when I was on the football team, they installed debt in my chest and they drove their trucks on the swamp conifers and carved encyclopedias into the pines and our homecoming king took a knife to his abdomen to spell the words MINING TOWN.

When I worked in the prison, they concreted everything so that the yard wasn’t, and the smell was of feces and lives frozen as poison and

when I worked in security, they put me in an isolated guard shack where there was no heat and no one else around for miles and I’d listen to the wolves and would wonder if they were coming from inside me.

When I worked on the ambulance, my partner would make fun of the patients as soon as the patients weren’t our patients and he would reenact their pain by holding his body in the distorted positions in which we found them and I’d go home and warn my parents that if they are ever on an ambulance to record everything because God can see everywhere but not inside the walls of piss and pus, and

when I was in middle school, they’d put us in lockers and light little pieces of paper, throwing them through the hole, telling us that we were going to experience what it’s like to be the sun and afterwards I’d go outside and stare up at it in the hope that I’d go blind forever and it didn’t happen because I could never take the pain and instead would go home and swim in the neighbor’s empty pool, me and a buddy, just moving our arms and walking in that big useless pit.

When I was in PTSD counseling, my counselor fell asleep so I decided to go to sleep too except I could see the helicopters on fire when I closed my eyes and so I just sat there, staring at him, watching him age so slowly, seeing the grandfather and the great-grandfather and the grand-corpse just begging to come out and

when I was in high school, we cheered the violence and admired the violence and encircled the violence and awarded the violence and moved back for the violence and watched the violence and the violence did its thing.

When I was dead, I realized that the earth was everything, that all there is is the earth, that the people on it are just dots, dips, dark, that we are spiders, that our arms are air, replaced so quickly.

But the earth.

But the earth.

Ron Riekki’s books include My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Apprentice House Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press).  Riekki co-edited Undocumented (Michigan State University Press) and The Many Lives of The Evil Dead (McFarland), and edited The Many Lives of It (McFarland), And Here (MSU Press), Here (MSU Press, Independent Publisher Book Award), and The Way North (Wayne State University Press, Michigan Notable Book).  Right now, he’s listening to Nick Drake’s “Northern Sky.”

Natchez Steamboat Found in 2007, Honey Island | Heather Dobbins

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Image: Justin Wilkens

The remains were raised by the Mississippi—an old song in shards.
Was it burned by accident? Or captured when New Orleans was,

run up to Yazoo River to escape Union hands, ashore in a bend?
Lincoln so wanted to roll unvexed to the sea.

Muted pitches in an old steamboat, its firebox is a gaping mouth
for coal. The river has the last say.

Each Natchez meant more bales, more boilers. There was no music
like the Natchez’s whistle. Heard was the length of the open

valve, vibration in steam—not air but rising steam rarefying in the bell.
But music doesn’t give out any answers.

The steam’s been gone. No one’s bragging on the Race of the Giants
or Captain Leathers anymore. The floating palace, wood rot come up

for air. The river is the last say.

Heather Dobbins is a native of Memphis, Tennessee. She is the author of two poetry collections, In the Low Houses (2014) and River Mouth (2017), both from Kelsay Press. She graduated from the College Scholars program at the University of Tennessee and earned her M.F.A. from Bennington College. Her poems and poetry reviews have been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Fjords, The Rumpus, TriQuarterly Review, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. For twenty years, she has worked as an educator (Kindergarten through college) in Oakland, California; Memphis, Tennessee; and currently, Fort Smith, Arkansas. Please see heatherdobbins.net for more. 

Editor Interviews | Emylee Amber

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Emylee Amber is an observer of the stars and an architect of art built on a foundation of words. She is passionate about music and helps her partner construct poetry to the sky with his band, Saeva. While observing the stars, Emylee runs her own Instagram based on the movements of the planets and other astrology-based information @eclipselunairee. Emylee is wandering about the Centennial State. Searching for things and those that peak her curiosity, while finding comfort in the embrace of the mountains and magic surrounding her. She contributed to Thought For Food (South Broadway Press, 2020) by editing the anthology and publishing her poem, Speak to Me.

Remember this place- we watched the skies turn dark and the leaves start their journey away.

The golden hour lasted forever and I couldn’t imagine calling any other place home.

It feels like we were dreaming the whole time- it was as though that quiet would last forever.

Unknown – Found on the bathroom wall at RitualCravt’s old location

What does this quote mean to you?

This quote found me when I was in the midst of an identity crisis. I had been wandering around for what felt decades in a vessel I hardly knew. It was the spring of 2018, after a brutal breakup that left me without many friends — in a city that I was from, but hadn’t grown up in. So everyone, including myself, was a stranger. Anonymous. I desperately wanted to embrace a feeling that felt like home, where I could recognize and understand myself. I was at an Astrology workshop at RitualCravt attempting to use the stars to lead me to this lingering desire. This quote was hanging above the light switch in the bathroom of RitualCravt’s old location. 

Upon reading it, I immediately felt seen. Heard. Understood. I knew of this place and it had felt like a “home”. I was saying goodbye to it, over and over again. Yet, at the same time, this reminded me that “this place” has yet to come. I will have another moment of quiet within the golden hour, and again, it will feel but only of a dream that was to last forever; and that’s the beauty of it.

What books have made an important impact on you and why?

Outside of my collection of art, occult, and poetry books — the most important impact I’ve had with stories wasn’t in a book at all. When I was a little monster, I had the hardest time falling asleep. My mother would lay with me in order for me to knock out. Most nights I couldn’t wind down, so eventually my mom started telling me bed-time stories. My favorite one, in particular, was about a little grey mouse who lived in a little grey house. She and I created a whole family for Little Grey, including his best friend Byron Brown. I can still picture the town I imagined in my head for him; I can see his favorite ice cream shop and the baseball fields Little Grey and his older brother, Fred, would practice at. The way my mom went into detail and came up with adventures meant the world to me. It helped me foster my imagination and showed me the importance of words. 

At a certain point in my childhood, I had drawn a map of Little Grey’s town. I came up with a story web on how each person in the town was related. I even started to draw pictures of Little Grey and his family. Unfortunately, the drafting of those stories into physical form never came to fruition since I could never fully remember them after a night of sleep. Yet, I will hold those memories dear in my heart. Maybe one day Little Grey’s adventures will be written again but until then I will remember to play in my imagination, use my words to tell stories or open up important conversations and remember sometimes the best stories can’t always be retold.

What is the value of writing and art in the current state of the world?

Priceless. Art has and will always be priceless, no matter the media. It tells a story. It’s a piece of history, of not only your life, but the world that once was and will be. It’s an escape, yet it is also a connection. It’s a song. It’s a smile. It’s that weird meme you came across on the internet that hits a little too close to home. Art is in everything that we do, that we speak, feel, touch, see, dream, and heck, even all of us are pieces of art too. 

This moment in history we are living in is the best time to remind society of the recognition art deserves. Let’s put pressure on those that do not recognize the impact of art and remind them that without art, they wouldn’t even be here; yes, corporations and the United States government — I am looking at you. Now is the time to use all of the medians we have at our disposal to break down those barriers, mark our history, and make our voices heard. Make our beliefs seen. Make the world remember that art is in you and me. Art is priceless.

How has writing and art helped to form the person you are today?

To be frank, I wouldn’t still be on this planet without writing and art. As a child, I was constantly living in my imagination. I sang from the time I knew how to make noise, started drawing as soon as my parent’s felt comfortable with me to use a writing utensil, and eventually fell in love with writing and storytelling. In middle school, we did a poetry course and I was enamored by the concept of expressing oneself in word play, exaggerated sentence structures, and without even addressing the topic. Eventually, it was the only way I could cope with my mental health and I found a lot of solace in this space I had cultivated for myself. Writing had been such a private avenue for me. I only shared my pieces to those I felt like would be the most connected to the matter. 

When I moved back to Colorado after graduating high school in Illinois, poetry led me to many friendships and opportunities within the Denver community. A professor-turned-friend, Tara Shea Burke, would seek out poetry readings at Mercury Café and Book Bar while encouraging me to not only tag along for the adventure, but to also share my pieces to a live audience. It was exhilarating. Those moments are what led me to having this opportunity to be an Editor with South Broadway Press, while also having the confidence to work on my own art within my astrology work and musical collaborations with my partner. (P.S. You need to check out Tara’s work — it is phenomenal!)

What is something that matters to you?

I’ll be honest, this is the last question I answered in this interview. There are a plethora of aspects within our society and life that matter to me, yet they all result back to people. So, I would say people matter to me. People’s behaviors, stories, opinions, and truths — what makes them so incredibly human; I can’t get enough of how important all of those little tidbits are. To how they will see the world around them and with those perspectives how it will impact their actions, shape their world and mine. 

I could spend hours observing people and trying to learn their story, while taking several days speaking with them to understand the shape they hold within this universe. I want to know what has taught them to grow and what they are still healing from. I want to know what they believe in and see if their beliefs are something that could hold truth in my world. 

It’s also a pastime of mine to try and figure out people’s planet placements within their natal chart by interacting with them. Since it helps me with understanding one of my passions but it also shows me that people aren’t black and white. As stated before, they are frickin’ art and they matter even if there are obstacles in our world showing them differently.

Anything else you’d like people to know?

You can find me slingin’ cards virtually or in a small gathering of friends almost weekly to play Magic: The Gathering. I almost picked my favorite flavor text, “Your life will set with the sun”, as my quote for this interview. If I’m not casting spells, I can be found listening to The Cure and Depeche Mode while wallowing in my teenage-angst by still being 110% obsessed with My Chemical Romance. Yes, I’m crying because I miss concerts.

The Beach Ritual | Mo Lynn Stoycoff

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Image: Ryan Loughlin

The banks look like a Goodwill store
washed up, clothes everywhere

Our bodies run down to the surf
shells bubble out of the sand

Salt teeth bite at our ankles
then our labia, breasts and eyes

We are fifty-six laughing
little islands of loamy flesh

We wash up onto the sand
pink and glinting in the sun

We find our clothes, soft as homespun,
warm as August dunes of sand

Four fire-lords build a circular blaze
that sways and rises to meet us

We too rise and sway, huddled
like fur weanlings at the breast

our chests rising and falling in sync
our smiles lit up and flickering.

We raise a sunny, rubicund cone
high, high into and through the fog

We shout, laugh and cry
firelit eyes each a salty ocean

We release it with smoke into the chill air
and dissolve into dance and drums

and silent pairs, trudging up the banks
trailing bits of circle as we go.

Mo Lynn Stoycoff is a writer and visual artist whose poems have appeared in Poetry Now, Rise Up Review, The American Journal of Poetry, California Quarterly, Speckled Trout Review and many other journals and anthologies. Mo works in the performing arts and lives in Central California.

Prometheus Felled | Heather Bourbeau

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Image: David Matos

Prometheus Felled

Bristlecone twist upon twist, layer upon layer, like fingers
of the crone or braids of her mother, reaching for the sky.
Cold air, hot sun. High desert survivor

dared erosions and fires, needed only a few small strips
of bark to stay alive, outlive them all.
But 5000 years were undone in one afternoon.

We want to know, to name.
We are Machiavellian in this pursuit.
Prometheus stole fire from the gods, carried it

in giant fennel stalk, gifted it to humans.
For this, he was bound to a rock, his liver to be eagle-eaten
every day, regrow at night and be eaten again.

To understand the brain’s hemispheres, we cut the corpus collosum.
To learn the spread of virus, we cull the herd, open skulls.
To know the oldest, we bored the bark,

failed, then cut and sectioned, hauled and processed.
Counted rings, counted time. Only then did we understand
the ignorance and arrogance.

Still, we kept one slab at Ely casino, then convention center.
Respect reserved for the lab or the field, now national park
in part because scientist-cum-lumberjack pushed

to protect remaining pine, hobble the folly
of men, like him, believing they need to know,
no matter the damnation, no matter the pain.

Update: Bourbeau’s poem “Prometheus Felled” is now part of her 2023 collection of poetry, Monarch, forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. You can find a copy of her book here.

Heather Bourbeau’s fiction and poetry have been published in 100 Word Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cleaver, Francis Ford Coppola Winery, Short Édition, The Cardiff Review, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she is the winner of La Piccioletta Barca’s inaugural competition and Chapman University Flash Fiction winner. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia.

This piece is a part of South Broadway Press’ March issue, Language of the Earth.

Suburban Garden Evicts Vegetables | Wendy BooydeGraaff

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Image: Alexander Sergienko
Peas zigzag through weeds, scaling borage instead of trellis. 
Tomatoes stagnate, grass and clover thrive, tender beets

sprout alongside dandelions tubers. Uprooting one hefty weed 
evicts the fledgling vegetables. It all grows, though the weeds 

grow best. My own roots reach back to clean plow lines and blooming 
rows: eighty acres of fruit farm plus a rectangle of Ontario’s Eden 

beside the old garage: all-you-can-eat green beans, snow peas, cherry 
tomatoes, rhubarb for pie and stewed berries over ice cream.

I grew up knowing a weed is a weed and a plant 
is sacred. Behold my upscaled quagmire—Royal Burgundy Beans, 

rainbow chard, heirloom Spanish radishes, yellow pear tomatoes—
mingled with timothy, dandelion, broadleaf plantain. A feast of colours 

descendant of rain-scented soil spread down a long laced 
table, paired with a leggy wine. Inside, I hear the garden 

call. Dillweed whispers and waves, its delicate imitation 
fern summons rusted canning rings while blue morning 

glories drown everything by mid-August.

Wendy BooydeGraaff’s poems, stories, and essays have been included in Critical Read, Not Very Quiet, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Meniscus, and elsewhere. Originally from Ontario, where she grew up on a fruit farm, she now lives in Michigan suburbia.

This piece is a selection from South Broadway Press’ March issue, Language of the Earth.

Alienor | LindaAnn Lo Schiavo

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Image: LindaAnn LoSchiavo

To unobservant eyes they seem like plants.

Long, limber stalks with out-sized bulbous heads
Could be confused with other specimens,
Especially to folks who’ve never seen
Exotics rooted in a foreign pod.

By night they leave protected flowerpots.

Exhaling oxygen, these beings fly,
Determined to reverse what climate change
Eroded by offsetting greenhouse gas
With purifying breaths, restoring trees,
And tackling global warming, ice-shelf melt.

I won’t reveal this methodology.

My job is to provide fresh nutrients ― ―
Ingredients from our rare biosphere.

Then curious balloon contraptions sail
These pods to sites that need repair and care.

Disguised as gladiator allium,
Purple florets compressed inside a round,
Attractive head, the team disperses from
Each stem ― ― a green antenna ― ― gets to work. 

Earthlings don’t know extraterrestrials

Are wise, solution oriented, pained
By man’s destruction, astral gifts blood-stained.


Night winds blow golden over what’s reclaimed
And what’s unfinished. Damaged nature won’t
Regenerate except through tender tips
Renewing fruited plains, life’s green wealth,
’til Earth rejoices in its own undeath.

Native New Yorker LindaAnn LoSchiavo, recently Poetry SuperHighway’s Poet of the Week, is a member of SFPA and The Dramatists Guild. Her poetry collections “Conflicted Excitement” [Red Wolf Editions, 2018], “Concupiscent Consumption” [Red Ferret Press, 2020], and Elgin Award nominee “A Route Obscure and Lonely”‘ [Wapshott Press, 2019] along with a contribution in “Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice”  [Macmillan in the USA, Aracne Editions in Italy]  are her latest titles.

This piece is part of South Broadway Press’ March 2021 issue, The Language of the Earth.

Editor Interviews | Chloë Thompson

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Chloë Thompson is a proto-southern queer poet eating from the hands of her loved ones on the dusty floors of Maryland and in the deep greens of Oregon. She is the author of the self-published poetry collection Badzooka Joe and makes albums. she opens the crypt at LoveSexGodTalk and is the Bean Bag Captain at Open Seas Coffee.

Pardon me for taking your needle, pardon me for threading the needle with your body, pardon me for love, pardon me for I am what I am, and I do not know what this means.

Leonora Carrington

What does this quote mean to you?

I’m deeply religious in the way that I believe in bodies and the unknown, and I’m always looking for works of literature outside the Bible that manage to find a way to make the physical and the disappearing remain prescient. Many different kinds of faith seekers came before me and used their words to explain mystical traditions, selfless acts, and transcendence of the body. Artists like Carrington remind me that all the ideas we have about what words and bodies can do can never be finalized; but instead, constantly create warmth as they remain in a state of continuous germination. The flesh, the word, and knowing need each other. I also just really like this quote because it reminds me of a great drill song called “I Am What I Am” by an incredible Chicago rapper named King Von who was tragically murdered in 2020. This congruency of words, mirroring throughout time, is an essential reminder that all art is atemporal and begins communications within worlds that are not expected to overlap.  

What books have made an important impact on you and why?

I’m going to make this embarrassingly Christian really quick and then get to some “real” books… if I’m going Old Testament, the Book of Ruth. I read this story because it reveals the sanctity of loving whatever kind of mother you got and of sleeping at a lover’s feet. If I’m going New Testament, 1 Corinthians. 1 Corinthians is a sacred text that is part of a huge black intellectual tradition wherein the scope of oppression could be dimmed in comparison to the vastness of love. This letter of the apostle Paul gives me faith in my Blackness because black people have somehow managed to turn a damning letter demanding that believers shore up their spiritual praxis into a love note that requests seeing others as one sees the self. I could fall asleep in this passage, specifically 1 Corinthians 13, and feel like I was floating on a little pink cloud. In fact, I may have had this experience before. In some form.I have been chastised by friends and mentors alike for being a little too into long books by old white men but I aim to be truthful so I will name them here. I am an avid Dostoevsky reader because he taught me that you can lay a world out and tear it down piece by piece if an audience is willing to take the plunge with you. The Brothers Karamazov taught me the beginnings of my faith and began my pursuit of the archetype of the “holy fool”; clueless yet imbued with God’s grace. I think everyone should read Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism (which is by Anonymous, but it’s definitely a white guy) alone with a highlighter and a notebook because it is important to stake out claims for knowledge by yourself, if only sometimes. Anything by Sylvia Wynter or Sianne Ngai carves out the edges of my happy place because I know they both would want me to think fiercely for myself yet in unity with others. And my favorite book ever is Liliane by Ntozake Shange because we speak the same language, plain and simple.

What is the value of writing and art in the current state of the world?

I think for the past 9-10 months the current state of the world for me has solely been writing and art (due to Magickal Negro Dissociation Tactics), in which lies its/their value. Art’s consumption defies the logic of the societal constructions we arbitrarily throw up. And art makes everyone way more humble than anyone presumes they can be. Art is a constant kick-in-the-face that tells you non-stop that everything you think about yourself and the world around you was either told to you or through you. Art itself even defies the logic and constructions we erect around it. I didn’t think that theory could be art until I read The Theory of the Young Girl. I didn’t know that the distance videos my friends send me of their beautiful faces were something so special until I taught myself to recognize that created, captured beauty. The magnitude of appreciating a finely created thing disintegrates a lot of the obstacles between people and refocuses us, if even temporarily, on the magnificence of being. Like, oh wow man, you made this? For that one little moment, I can forget the hyper-technological and violent world we live in. It’s less that I even forgot it and more that I recognize that art creates an itty-bitty new world, which we can choose to live in. Even for 3 seconds. That’s an imagined-future; a created change.

How has writing and art helped to form the person you are today?

I started writing poetry because I needed to make sense of being a freaky black girl around a bunch of hayseeds and rednecks. I made a voice. I didn’t care if my voice sounded like theirs and a million other people(s) just as long as I knew it was uniquely mine. Now I’ve been a lot more places and seen a lot more things and I still run along with the same credos. My voice, if it looks like anything, probably resembles a stalactite. Or a stalagmite. Just a lot of layers of something. Maybe sedimentary rock? I know that knowing that I really wanted to be a person who had something to say was the ember that became a fire in my belly. Now I’m a woman who won’t shut up and I’m really, really proud of that.

What is something that matters to you?

Faith, land, beans, grace, rain, hip-rolling, prayer, divination, the phrase “making love”, humility, radiance, the fusion between earth signs and fire signs, dreaming a little dream, waking up in the morning to another day.

Anything else?

What’s the real difference between esoteric and exoteric? Anybody know?

Editor Interviews | Morgan L. Ventura

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Morgan L. Ventura (They/She) is a Sicilian-Irish American expatriate living between Vancouver, Canada, and Oaxaca, Mexico. Originally hailing from the (haunted) Midwest, Ventura was an archaeologist in their former life, but converted to anthropology and folklore only to now become a speculative poet, essayist, translator, and fiction writer. Their poetry and translations have appeared in Strange Horizons, Augur Magazine, and Ghost City Review, among others, while essays can be found in Geist Magazine, Folklore Thursday, and Jadaliyya. Ventura’s poem, “Extinction No. 6,” was nominated for both the Rhysling Award and Canada’s National Magazine Award for Best Poem. Find them on Twitter: @hmorganvl.

If I abandon this project I would be a man without dreams and I don’t want to live like that: I live my life or I end my life with this project.

Werner Herzog

What does this quote mean to you?

I’m a big fan of Werner Herzog, and I realize that people respond to his cinema and writing like marmite: you either hate him or adore him. In order to understand me, you must understand Herzog – what drives his passions is a particular philosophical orientation toward the world that upholds the concept of dreams and dreaming. We may see dreaming as a passive act, or as an action that is often unknown, misunderstood, even irrational, but dreaming is also critical to envisioning new futures, fresh perspectives on not only what the world is but what it could be. Just as I’m nothing without my dreams, a world that’s stopped dreaming would also indicate the end of possibility. 

What books have made an important impact on you and why?

I’ve always been a voracious reader – haven’t we all? It’s a difficult question to answer because I’ve consumed countless books and stories in the form of novels, anthologies, and the internet. As a child, I loved Michael Ende’s the Neverending Story, which is essentially a fabulist story deeply concerned with psychology, self-worth, and corruption. It asks the reader to find themselves in the story, to take charge and become the person they could only dream of, and then presents the classic temptation of pure, unadulterated power. Whereas I was less captivated by the second half of the book and thus the parable, I became obsessed with the idea that a whole other world reflecting our deepest desires and fears could exist, and, even more, would cease to exist when we grew up and began to forget. This is another book – maybe this is a very German way of thinking – that positions dreaming as key to being human, almost critical to our survival. 

On an entirely different (and more recent) note, I always am reading Samantha Irby’s writing because I need that kind of levity (code: give-zero-shits attitude) in my life. If you haven’t read her blog piece on her substack, Bitches Gotta Eat, called “Block People and Pretend They Died,” you absolutely must do that right now. Carmen María Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties left me breathless, and as a survivor of sexual assault, the way she deals with violence is unlike anything I’ve ever read. I finally felt seen and understood after reading Machado. I carry with me a copy of Seamus Heaney’s, Seeing Things (1991), which is both spiritually moving and otherworldly with lyrical verse such as “The stone’s alive with what’s invisible…”. But my favorite collection of poetry right now is If All the World and Love Were Young, by Stephen Sexton. I picked up a copy while visiting Belfast, Northern Ireland, and it’s just the most astounding, tender, and luminous chapbook I’ve ever read. Wrestling with the grief of losing his mother, Sexton wrote a series of elegiac poems channeled through Super Mario World. Read it. 

What is the value of writing and art in the current state of the world?

Creativity is priceless, which is to say it is incompatible with the society we live in. The world is more or less stuck within the confines of an unbridled capitalistic system where any act of production carries a price-tag so that it can be exchanged and consumed. Art and the act of writing carry an intrinsic symbolic value – they exist, I believe, to not only bring beauty and illumination to society as we know it, but they’re also powerful tools of transformation. Ritual acts of creativity, art and creative writing helps us imagine new ways of existing. Without either, we would never be able to address structural and systemic problems, and on a less tangible level, we wouldn’t be able to nourish the emotional and spiritual dimensions of being human. If I could change how writing and art were received by other facets of society, writers and artists would be salaried, supported unconditionally with universal income because without us the world would be painfully dull. Try to imagine a day without music, without photography and drawing, poems, stories, films, and television. 

How has writing and art helped to form the person you are today?

Writing and art helped me survive an inordinate amount of trauma. It’s helped me process and imagine other lives, other worlds. I find a lot of power in speculation, which allows me to put distance between myself and open wounds. Writing poetry and stories has strengthened me, it’s reshaped me and helped me realize that the answers to my questions don’t reside in the academy but rather through the twinned acts of creation and reception. 

What is something that matters to you?

Justice. Justice means a lot to me. Many of my poems – whether they be lamentations, requiems, or elegies – they all explore grief by interrogating the notion of justice. I’m not sure if justice can ever be achieved here, in this world, but I’m interested in what we call the three R’s in anthropology and archaeology: repatriation, restitution, and reparations. Some collectives speak of restorative justice, and I like this term, too. Art can be a powerful intervention, and creative acts – essays, poems, and most science-fiction – are often positioned as sociopolitical commentary. And while I find a lot of value in crafting narratives that eviscerate the current structures-that-be, I am actively engaged in projects of repatriation and restorative justice. One project, stemming from my doctoral fieldwork and co-directed with a friend of mine from Mexico City, returns the ethnographic fieldnotes of an anthropologist from the 1930s to the Indigenous community in Oaxaca where this anthropologist spent several years conducting research. She’d never translated or shared her work with the community, and so I saw repatriation and translation of these documents in Spanish and Zapotec as a mode of justice and way of correcting historical power asymmetries. The archive will now exist on a community curated website; after more than 80 years, they’ll control the narratives and have their history present to share however and whenever they like. 

Anything else?

I love sunflowers and cats, I watch the Mummy (1999) annually, and not-so-secretly enjoy Italodisco and dream pop.

Editor Interviews | Brice Maiurro

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Brice Maiurro (he/him) is a poet from Earth. His work has been compiled into two collections, Stupid Flowers and Hero Victim Villain. He has been featured by The Denver Post, Boulder Weekly, Suspect Press, and Poets Reading the News. www.maiurro.co

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

John Lennon

What does this quote mean to you?

I think about this quote just about every day of my life. It’s so easy to get swept up in any moment into what seems so important, while those little things fly on by. Recently, I took care of a dog, a great dog, Garbanzo, while my friends were in the process of moving. I’ve never had a dog, I grew up with cats, and I was very excited. I felt like a little kid the whole time, taking him on walks, chasing him (or having him chase me) around the house, taking weekend naps curled up beside him, it was amazing. I work from home like a lot of us and analyzing business processes for a solar company felt really important until I’d look over and see Garbanzo, belly up, requesting a few good belly pats. Every day at work I told myself there was no time for me to go on a walk, but when I was watching Garbanzo, I was outside, bundled-up, several times a day and I was so happy about it.

What books have made an important impact on you and why?

Radical Dharma by Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens and Jamine Syedullah. Since I was maybe 22, the ideologies of Buddhism have always resonated with. I was raised Catholic and that didn’t stick, but Buddhism has always made sense to me. It’s a religion, or ideology, built around intentionality and compassion. There’s a lot of wiggle room to find your own way within the forests it offers you. Especially something like Zen Buddhism, that often has an attitude of “always do this… unless it doesn’t work for you!” I appreciate the grey space, but found myself plateauing in my Buddhism over the last couple years, as with American Buddhism comes a lot of white people feeling kind sitting on a yoga mat while there’s big revolutions going on outside of its doors. Radical Dharma busted open those doors for me and showed me this new beautiful intersection of anti-racism with queerness with Buddhism. That you have to take your Buddhism practice into dismantling it all.

Lama Rod’s experiences of rejecting his Christian roots really resonated with me. He found he had a lot of anger, but opted to say “this isn’t for me” rather than “let’s burn this to the ground.” Rev. angel reminded me the ideas of existing in a state of not having all the answers, and expanded my ideas of queerness beyond gender and sexuality into a larger realm of seeing how binary thinking is so pervasive in the smallest microcosms of our culture to the very large interlocking systems of oppression that we should collectively disrupt and transition to a better place. Radical Dharma reminded me that our liberation is a collective liberation and we all have to use the tools we’ve been given to work together.

What is the value of writing and art in the current state of the world?

I see it all as storytelling. In many ways, we all exist in silos. Storytelling is a way to peek into someone else’s silo, maybe inch their silo a little bit closer to our own. Storytelling can be a time capsule, it can be an exercise in compassion and solidarity, and I believe with the right considerations in place, it can be a therapy.

How has writing and art helped to form the person you are today?

I discovered poetry almost on accident. I just was bored and found myself messing around with words. The words led to more words, which led to poetry events, which led to a larger, though far from holistic, understanding of Denver’s communities, and through all of that, I’ve been able to teach things with my words, but what I love maybe more is being the student. I’m very blessed, in considering all my privilege, that for years I’ve had the chance to be exposed to the writing and art of so many people unlike myself. That continues to challenge me.

As for my writing now, writing is best for me when it’s fun. When I’m having fun, I feel like I’m doing something well.

What is something that matters to you?

Kindness matters to me. Small gestures that set the tone of the world we deserve to gift each other. Goofiness is a virtue of mine, sincerity. Cooking matters to me. I love that cooking offers me this chance to spend time by myself in the kitchen, and then share the rewards of that time with the people near and dear to my heart. My partner, Shelsea Ochoa, matters to me. She challenges me to do more and be more, and especially to be myself more.