An interview with the Virginia Poet Laureate on poetry as witness, colonial history’s hauntings, and her longstanding poem-a-day practice
REPEAT: you stay up memorizing all the twists and turns of a ‘proper’ / enunciation and still your tongue fails you the morning after, syllables / flopping in your mouth like a dead fish, cleaved in shame.
& on the drive to LAX /when I ask you not to cry this time, you look / at me with reverence as if to say, what came from me / is so much more than I am
Older now, the sparrow God / gave my grandmother in place /of succulence.
Our Lady of Scapulars, we carry you around / like credentials, like disgrace, we suffer
this insufferable heat and your packaged spirit’s / smothered by the reek of our sweat—how much closer / must we be?
REPEAT: you stay up memorizing all the twists and turns of a ‘proper’ / enunciation and still your tongue fails you the morning after, syllables / flopping in your mouth like a dead fish, cleaved in shame.
Our Lady of Scapulars, we carry you around / like credentials, like disgrace, we suffer
this insufferable heat and your packaged spirit’s / smothered by the reek of our sweat—how much closer / must we be?
& on the drive to LAX /when I ask you not to cry this time, you look / at me with reverence as if to say, what came from me / is so much more than I am
Older now, the sparrow God / gave my grandmother in place /of succulence.