Our last featured author from GATHERING: A Women Who Submit Anthology, is Alixen Pham. Her poem, “How I Respond to a Health Care Survey” is a call and response to life and death and how between the answers we provide to the questions asked in the most tender moments. To hold Alixen’s poem in your hands and all of the work featured this past month, order your copy of GATHERING here.
How I Respond to a Health Care Survey
by ALIXEN PHAM
after Solmaz Sharif
IN THE LAST SIX MONTHS how often have you seen your
PROVIDER? The one who charges me $300 for
CHECK-UP and SPECIALIZED CARE about my health, but never
ADVICE about what to do when my mother was dying. Instead asking:
HOW MANY DAYS DID YOU USUALLY HAVE TO WAIT for her body to shut down?
MEDICAL QUESTIONS needed to be asked
DURING REGULAR OFFICE HOURS as I waited in darkness for the sun’s
FOLLOW UP to give me death’s time table. Would it squeeze my mother in:
SAME DAY
1 DAY
2-3 DAYS
4-7 DAYS
8-14 DAYS
15-30 DAYS
MORE THAN 30 DAYS. At which point, who do I call? Who would
EXPLAIN THINGS IN A WAY THAT WAS EASY TO UNDERSTAND? Who would
LISTEN CAREFULLY TO me cry, Don’t go, I’m sorry, even as the
BLOOD TEST, X-RAY OR OTHER TEST alerted the machines to order the casket.
CUSTOMER SERVICE STAFF gave me End-of-Care forms to sign, as if giving
WORST POSSIBLE – BEST POSSIBLE ratings about ways to die from, or survive the trauma of losing limbs, hair and organs, or loved ones could be reduced into sensible ways to
MANAGE YOUR CARE the way my mother used to manage her kitchen, treating knives, meats and vegetables with
COURTESY AND RESPECT. The neighbors and entire church praised her fried eggrolls, fried rice and shrimp & cabbage salad. Never noticed me cooking by her side. Mom’s mini-me. I realized years later, she was my Institute Le Cordon Bleu, the Michelin in my star.
HOW WOULD YOU RATE YOUR OVERALL MENTAL OR EMOTIONAL HEALTH during this time? The choices are:
EXCELLENT
VERY GOOD
GOOD
FAIR
POOR—which surely can’t be the lowest option, considering death is obliviously worse than poor. Where are their Bedside Manners? Didn’t they learn Level 101 in school? Instead, they ask me:
WHAT IS THE HIGHEST GRADE OR LEVEL OF EDUCATION THAT YOU HAVE COMPLETED? As if heaven is partitioned by high school, college, some college, graduate, PhD or Other degrees. How did anyone get in pre-language? Pre-civilizations? Pre-everything?
WHAT IS YOUR RACE (MARK ONE OR MORE), as if skin color was a factor in doling out empathy and morphine. It seemed they had failed to grasp the compassion of death when it asked:
DID SOMEONE HELP YOU COMPLETE your mother’s dying? YES, I ended her suffering. Turned off her oxygen. Upped her painkiller. Watched her last breath take I love you beyond my reach.
author Alixen Pham
Alixen Pham is published with The Slowdown,New York Quarterly, Salamander, Gyroscope Review, DiaCRITICS, Soul-Lit, and Brooklyn Poets as Poet of the Week. She has been nominated for Best of the Net Anthology 2020-2021. She leads the Westside Los Angeles chapter of Women Who Submit, a volunteer-run literary organization supporting and nurturing women and non-binary writers. She is the recipient of Brooklyn Poets Fellowship, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Writer-to-Writer Mentorship Program and PEN Center / City of West Hollywood Writing Craft Scholarship in Fiction and Nonfiction. She fusion bakes between writing poetry, fiction and nonfiction work.
As Women Who Submit prepares to launch our second anthology, Gathering, we will be featuring WWS authors across the genres and highlighting their forthcoming work.
Students in Los Angeles celebrate Dia de los Muertos.
Our first featured writer is poet, Marisol Cortez, a member from San Antonio. We celebrate this poem on its one-year anniversary, long before the winter surge, the election, and the Delta variant. It reminds us that although so many days from the past year/month/days bleed together, the past also contains distinct moments. This excerpt reminds us what life was like 365 days ago as well as what life is and has always been. It expands on the idea of loyalty and allegiance; connecting and reflecting upon this fast-changing and forever constant world.
Loyalty Oath: Dia de los Muertos 2020
by Marisol Cortez
I pledge allegiance to birds and Black birders I pledge allegiance to sea turtles and silly gulls I pledge allegiance to yard sales, plate sales, voguing, ancient foraging circuits: nuez, tuna, nopal, yuca All the gifts of this land we once wandered, not lost like Cabeza de Vaca, but logically seasonally ecologically moving. I pledge allegiance to dewberries growing on the banks of the lake the Army Corps made from dammed up river and the red hornets who live there too, whose protective sting to my brow while foraging sends me reeling, falling backwards with the force of a strike
I pledge allegiance to sacred springs I pledge allegiance to every wetland and swamp that hid runaway slaves and Native boarding school children. May every effort to drain you fail, may we fill you up again instead, restore you, so that no White House built beneath the lash may comfortably occupy your Potomac slough.
I pledge allegiance to rivers that swallow up ill-gotten walls and the lies that built them I pledge allegiance to the burning forests— Amazonian, ancient redwood and all alveoli everywhere: from Floyd’s breath extinguished beneath boot and badge on a hot Minneapolis sidewalk to the breaths of elders artificially inflated by ventilators down in the RGV: I pledge allegiance to all lungs, all breath, arboreal or mammalian, Aeolian winds of the body which resist just by inspiring exhaling surviving
To read this poem in its stunning and expansive entirety, look for Gathering: a Women Who Submit Anthology. Preorder Gatheringhere!
Rooted in San Antonio, Marisol Cortez writes across genre about place and power for all the other borderwalking weirdos out there. Always a poet, for a time she strayed into an academic career, earning a Ph.D. in cultural studies before returning to San Antonio to write in service of movements to protect la madre tierra. A mama of two, she currently juggles writing, parenting, and co-editing responsibilities for Deceleration, an online journal of environmental justice thought and praxis.
In 2020 she published her debut novel Luz at Midnight (FlowerSong Press 2020), which in 2021 won the Texas Institute of Letter’s Sergio Troncoso Award for First Book of Fiction. She is also the author of I Call on the Earth(Double Drop Press 2019), a chapbook of documentary poetry, and “Making Displacement Visible: A Case Study Analysis of the ‘Mission Trail of Tears,’” which together bear witness to the forced removal of Mission Trails Mobile Home Community. Other poems and prose have appeared in Mutha Magazine, About Place Journal, Orion, Vice Canada, Caigibi, Metafore Magazine, Outsider Poetry, Voices de la Luna, and La Voz de Esperanza, among other anthologies and journals. For updates on projects and publications, visit mcortez.net.
It’s time for WWS’s publication roundup to celebrate all of our fantastic members who published in August. Submitting work and publishing it are daunting tasks, even during the best of times, which these aren’t. So all of our WWS members should be applauded for their determination to get their words out into the world.
This month, let’s celebrate these WWS members for their publication achievements!
Congratulations to Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo and Jenise Miller, whose collaborative video poem “For the Love of LA” appears on YouTube courtesy of The Music Center.
More congrats to Jenise Miller, whose poem “Right/Isthmus” appeared in PANK.
On a black machine in the exam room, I read the words right/isthmus. I only knew isthmus, as narrow body of land, water on two sides, home to my great-grandparents, their bodies black machines that dug the canal where two oceans now meet.
Early in his campaign, Donald Trump boasted that “I know words. I have the best words,” yet despite these assurances his speech style has sown conflict even as it has powered his meteoric rise. If the Trump era feels like a political crisis to many, it is also a linguistic one. Trump has repeatedly alarmed people around the world, while exciting his fan-base with his unprecedented rhetorical style, shock-tweeting, and weaponized words. Using many detailed examples, this fascinating and highly topical book reveals how Trump’s rallying cries, boasts, accusations, and mockery enlist many of his supporters into his alternate reality.
A shout out to Isabella Rose for publishing the chapter “Self-Love: A Valuable Gift” in the anthology Life is a Gift: Loving You. From the description of the anthology:
Each co-author shares their inspired wisdom and wealth of experience to guide readers to enhance and heal relationships with others as well as within themselves. What has been described as the “Self-Love Bible”, Life Is A Gift: Loving You reveals methods to becoming self-aware, shares poetry and stories to reveal the truth of life and teaches to look at life from a different perspective.
Kudos to Teresa Reilly Keesan, who published the essay “Til Death” in the Summer 2020 issue of Joo Magazine (pp. 24-27).
I can’t remember when I first met Dr. Patil and I don’t know what my brain looks like inside. He does.
My memory is shot these days, but I remember the bananas and almonds I’d eaten the morning of my accident. And how, an hour or so later after weight training at the gym, I got on an elliptical until my stomach started to ache.Somehow — maybe I fainted or perhaps I just slipped — I fell and cracked my head against another exercise machine. Blood from a bisected meningeal vein blossomed into a catastrophic epidural hematoma, the growing pressure rising up against the bone. The force of the fall ricocheted by brain inside its cocoon, resulting in a seizure, a contrecoup concussion, and a subdural hematoma: a second pocket of blood fizzling on the brain.
Also check out Elline Lipkin’s poem “Two Braids” published in the Winter/Spring 2020 edition of the Notre Dame Review.
And there’s also Thea Puschel’s flash fiction “Safer at Home,” which was a winner of The Abstract Elephant’s 2020 Summer Fiction Contest.
No one ever thinks it will happen to them. Those things you see in the news. The bolt of lightning that strikes a person. The body left charred. The car that drove through a living room and knocked the house off its foundation. The child hit as he crossed the street, leaving behind red streaks of blood where he once stood. It has always happened to someone else. Not to me. Not to my family.
From Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, the flash fiction “What He Needs to Know” published by Toho Publishing.
It takes all my energy to focus on my cafeteria cups: soup, coffee, and a gelatinous blob that calls itself dessert. The lunch crowd is long gone, and the easy listening music overhead echoes in the emptiness. I’ve been at the hospital since 5:00 a.m., and this is my first meal. Without looking up, I feel her standing across from me, see her hands on the opposing chair.
My ex-husband’s new girlfriend clears her throat.
And to Flint, congratulations on publishing the creative nonfiction piece “Avery” with Erotic Review.
I’m not proud to admit this, but eight years ago I went through this phase where I was suddenly attracted to men. Or if you prefer, persons with a non-detachable penis. So I went straight to the source, and posted an ad on the Craigslist W4M personals in Los Angeles: Kinky Queer Chick In Heterocurious Phase & Wondering What All the Fuss Is About. I was a very popular W.
Although we do not refer to them as disabled writers, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, and Flannery O’Connor had traumatic brain injury, depression, and lupus, respectively. We could dedicate an encyclopedia solely to American writers with mental illness, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Sylvia Plath and William Styron to David Foster Wallace, and more recently Esmé Weijun Wang. The list is endless, but of these writers only Wang, whose first book was published in 2016, has directly addressed her identification with the word disability.
Jet lag, long and difficult flights, and sleepless nights are only a few of the afflictions endured with frequent travel. For most travelers, these are managed in myriad ways – from adjusting clocks a week ahead of flying, drinking endless glasses of water, imbibing cherry juice, downing bottles of melatonin, cutting caffeine and alcohol, upping the Xanax doses, or taking a chance porting THC products across international boundaries.
That’s what I call you because the mere sight of your go big or go home smile is like the sun filtering through our shutters on a bright California day. It’s the summer before your 13th birthday but for months now you’ve been reiterating that you’re taller than me, that you can almost fit in your father’s shoes, that your dreams are ever-changing: soccer player, drummer, paramedic. You are just as strong-willed as you were as a toddler, but to my delight your personality has also emerged as outgoing and kind. You are compassionate to strangers, concerned about world issues, and you are constantly, unabashedly questioning. It is usually in these moments of inquiry where my enchantment with you turns to frustration and fear. You see son, I have lived in this Black skin longer than you have. I have learned to walk a fine line between approachable and articulate, between joy and rage. I know that the difference between coming home alive or becoming a hashtag might be the stifling of my understandable need to question someone’s unjust begrudging of my humanity. So your father and I usually exchange a glance and maybe a sigh and in the small window before you disappear into your video games with friends, we try to explain to you the terrifying duality of being Black and being perceived as an adult in America.
Lituo Huang’s microflash “16A” appeared in Daily Drunk Posts.
The woman on the bed, with hair like brown shoelaces over her scalp, says, “I told you to never trust anyone who puts on shoes to get the mail.
Nurses, grocery clerks, postal workers, Lyft drivers, and the folx who deliver your quarantine snacks — they can all wear masks at work without raising eyebrows. But strippers all across the country are required to wear zero (or tiny) clothing in order to perform in tight, sweaty quarters in close contact with strangers. At some strip clubs in Los Angeles, performers even sign contracts agreeing to be naked on the floor. If they break the rule and wear a single article of clothing, they are fined up to 80 dollars.
When COVID-19 raged across the United States, strippers, massage therapists, nail salon technicians, and many other workers who rely on human touch watched our livelihoods vanish without any warning — and for thousands of us, the possibility of any federal or state assistance remains frustratingly out of reach.
Over the last five years, I’ve studied all of the child fatalities in Los Angeles County with open Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) investigations. To some, this research might seem grim, but I’ve found comfort in unpacking these redacted files. The files trickle in from my public records requests, five or ten at a time. I spend hours identifying the blacked-out information. I start by checking the child’s age and date of death in one of these case files against a Los Angeles Times homicide report. Then I search the Internet for other clues, the dark boxes slowly revealing some of the facts of their story.
Doubtless, one of the things that draws me to the files is the short spell I spent in the child welfare system. It’s a club you join and never leave. There is no loneliness like the loneliness of being taken from your mother. I’m forty-three now and grieve that loss again and again.
On Thursday we published “‘Hansel and Gretel’ in LA County” by Melissa Chadburn. The title we came up with, I realized only later, was an unconscious homage to Iphigenia in Forest Hills, Janet Malcolm’s great book about a murder trial involving a child custody battle that took place in Queens. There is a genuine thematic link, in fact, with Chadburn’s story—which, though based on her empirical research into welfare services investigations of child deaths, also draws on the mythic roots of the violence and horror that occur inside families.
Several days each week in my neighborhood in South Los Angeles I head out for a run. When my family and I moved here in 2018, the neighborhood was already shifting. It was the summer before teachers were preparing to go on strike, before the spring when Nipsey Hussle was murdered just a few blocks away. It was a year after Alton Sterling was killed by police and two years before Ahmaud Arbery.
I run through the neighborhood captured by Lynell George in After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame. She writes about these streets as the veins and arteries of her childhood, and now this is where I run in pleasant weather: up 59th Street to Alviso, across Slauson, and up the hill.
On the first day of Hindi class, I learned the word for “vomiting.” Not one of the words I would have introduced had this been my language class to teach, but in returning to the classroom as the student, I kept my criticisms to a minimum. The textbook was to blame. The authors organized the chapters to provide handful of the characters in the Hindi alphabet, known as Devanagari, and then provide a small vocabulary list of words including those recently-taught letters. “A” is for “apple” and so on.
This is my first post as the new publication roundups editor. Thank you, Laura Warrell, for being such a fantastic editor for the past four and a half years.
For many of us, it’s been difficult to stay focused on writing during the ongoing crises that define our everyday lives. Time and again, Women Who Submit has been a touchstone, a reminder that creativity matters; that our words make a difference in the world.
To witness WWS members continue to submit their work and publish far and wide is an inspiration. So let’s join in celebrating this month’s literary successes of our community members!
Congratulations to Donna Spruijt-Metz, whose poem “Pebbles Along the Labyrinth- Psalm 31” was published by The Cortland Review, along with an audio recording.
Listening for mercy – I place pebbles
along the labyrinth – smooth
in YOUR hand
against the cutting nets of trust
Congratulations to Amy Shimshon-Santo, whose chapbook of erasure poems, Endless Bowls of Sky, was published this month by Placeholder’s Press’s Flashbulb!
Check out Li Yun Alvarado’s poem “To the White Parenting ‘Expert'” published by La Parent as part of “LA Parents Weigh in on Racism:”
Everything you said about poetry, I wanted to get naked with. You quoted the immortals: W.H. Auden saying we’re making a “verbal object,” Carl Sandburg claiming a poem was “an echo asking a shadow to dance,” and Howard Nemerov stating that poetry was “a means of seeing invisible things and saying unspeakable things about them.”
At 32 I fell for a man I met through OK Cupid. Still a couple of years before the dating app deluge, I joined the site determined to end my history with short-lived, non-boyfriends.
Congrats to Tanya Ko Hong, whose poems “Journey (여행)” and “What I Really Want (내가 간절히 원하는 것은)” were published this month in The Global Korean Literature Magazine (Anthology 3).
Congratulations Arielle Silver, whose musical album and companion book, both titled “A Thousand Tiny Torches,” were released this month.
Now, more than a century later, I find myself amidst a deadly pandemic, worried about keeping my family safe while staying afloat financially. I dread that we will wind up where my grandmother’s family did: ravaged by loss, fighting to rebuild in the outbreak’s aftermath.
Liu’s novel succeeds not just as fine-tuned historical fiction but also as an insightful portrait of individuals determined to understand and embrace the humanity of all. The book is set within the context of the British colonial system’s arrogant dehumanization of anyone perceived as “other.”
Congrats to Soleil David, whose poem “Xyliphius sofiae” appeared in Coal Hill Review.
I, a human being with eyes that swim in aqueous humor, hold a hand out
in absolute darkness and cannot see it.
From Désirée Zamorano, her short story “Norma” was published by PANK.
She could not stop being his mother; he made his own decisions. That was how it should be. What she needed to do was sip and enjoy the wine, his presence, their shared meal. She did not need the addition of the locura in her mind. Calmate, she told herself. To be a parent was to have expectations. To be an adult was to release them.
Congratulations to Laura Warrell, who published her essay “Writing While Black” in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
To write as a Black person in America is to sustain a barrage of gut punches from a community and industry that don’t do a great job transcending the larger inequities of the culture surrounding them. Writing is difficult and publishing hellish, but the path for Black writers is laden with unique indignities.
I am a radical atheist relearning to pray. Kneeling to conjure devotion, I hold my motherland between the palms of my hands, to protect her against all evils. My words, the beads of the rosary slipping through my fingers.
Also from Lisbeth, the poem “Allyship,” published by Cultural Weekly.
Identify the hair root-cause of self-hatred Mother washing my hair with chamomile tea To make it blonde But she only made me a “bachaca” “Yellow” All throughout my childhood I never understood why A woman who despised Black people Married the son of a Black woman
Congratulations to Melissa Chadburn, who published “The Archive” in The Paris Review Daily.
One quiet spring morning, as a plague engulfs America, I awake, brew coffee, and shuffle to my computer. Outside my windows, a cordillera of snow-thatched roofs. I feel rooted, glooming in grief and rage. The need to stay in place. In the place of our wreckage. In other homes, I imagine children in nightshirts, and daddy flipping pancakes, and some things still good. Meanwhile, the world continues to break in the ways that it has always been broken.
This year, May was gloomier than usual. Aside from a couple of blue-sky days, our typically beautiful Southern California May was thick and heavy, day after day draped in gray.
In the news, our school board chose a hedge fund manager to lead the district, public school teachers in Puerto Rico were being tear-gassed in the streets, and Chief of Staff John Kelly continued the current administration’s daily attack on immigrants.
In my eighth grade classroom, a distinct culture had developed. Students were challenging one another’s privilege and entitlement at every opportunity, which was important but exhausting, and I was begin to wonder if my students had learned anything in my class. My students were testing my nerves, and although we still had several weeks left, I was ready for the year to be over.
That was when I started to wade through the stacks of poetry collections each of my students submit for National Poetry Month. It took me a while to get started. Some kids cared very little about the project and that was clear in what they turned in, but every year I am also left in awe by the intimate experiences my students share and the exquisite hand-crafted publications they create. For several days, I poured over poems about families, and cats, and food. There were whole chapbooks about Fortnite, and depression, life and love. Some poems told serious stories or grappled with current events. Others assembled light collections of linked haiku or short, rhyming poems. But each group of poems spoke volumes about these particular young people at this precise moment in time and helped me see each of their unique and precious lives.
As I finished reading, the US relocated it’s Israeli Embassy to Jerusalem and in protests in Gaza, over 60 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire. Our school community sits in Westwood, just south of UCLA in an area nicknamed Little Tehran because of the many Iranian families who made their homes here. Our racial, socioeconomic, and religious diversity make our campus unique. There are students who fast for Ramadan, prepare for bar and bat mitzvahs, and attend catechism classes. I read articles about the most recent developments in the complex conflict in Gaza alongside poems by my diverse students who sit on both sides of this conflict, and wished Israelis and Palestinians could read one another’s poetry. It could show them their enemy’s heart and humanity and make it much more difficult to fire across that border.
Poems can provide intimate glimpses into the lives of others, and thankfully, according to recently released NEA research, poetry reading is on the rise. Although the gray of May still hung thick in the air and the headlines shifted away from the Middle East and toward the humanitarian refugee crisis at our own border, I found myself seeking hope in poetry. One of those poems was Yrsa Daley-Ward’s “Poetry” in which she writes, “You will come away bruised./ You will come away bruised/ but this will give you poetry.”
May was a bruise turned gray and cold, but from within all of the gloom, poetry brought out the human story. Poetry made me love my students again and see possibilities is the most problematic conflicts. As we wade through each tragic news cycle, keep pressing those keys. Keep reading each other’s words and writing your own. Keep sharing your work with the world. The world needs all of our stories, more than ever, to be a beacon through this dense fog.
Noriko Nakada edits the Breathe and Push column for Women Who Submit. She also writes, blogs, tweets, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Publications include two book-length memoirs: Through Eyes Like Mine and Overdue Apologies, and excerpts, essays, and poetry in Catapult, Meridian, Compose, Kartika, Hippocampus, The Rising Phoenix Review, and elsewhere.
The emerging writer opens her refrigerator door, reaching blindly for the green bottle of Belgian lager. She lets the chilled bottle ground her in the comfort of her own kitchen. The old cabinet drawer refuses her access to the bottle opener. Undisturbed by the small inconvenience, she places the bottle lid at the edge of the kitchen counter and smacks it with her fist.
The cold bottle rim touches the writer’s lips. She lets out a sigh of pleasure as the beer soothes her throat, hoarse from teaching all day. Then, she heads to her desk, where a few more hours of work await. Continue reading “Four Contests and Belgian Lager”
I am not a morning pages poet, nor am I a write everyday poet. To write every day, or close to every day, is something I have to work at, and by work I mean, it takes trickery. It takes a challenge like Poem-A-Day that happens every April for National Poetry Month. If you’ve never heard of this event, it’s similar to National Novel Writing Month—commonly known as NaNoWriMo—in September but without the cute name. For the month of April, in celebration of NPM, poets around the country and even the world, challenge themselves to write one new poem a day for 30 days. To help, many websites and journals give daily writing prompts. Many are free and some take a subscription. But here’s the thing, you don’t have to wait for April to challenge yourself, and to be honest, I have never successfully accomplished writing 30 poems in 30 days in April, and to be even more honest, I’ve only tried once, maybe twice.
I remember when George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin. I remember being devastated and posting the news announcement on my Facebook with the caption, “No words.” I couldn’t stop thinking about how Trayvon Martin, a 17 year old kid walking back from a convenience store with a bag of Skittles and an Arizona Ice Tea, never made it back to his father’s house, and how wrong that was. I had no words.
But then another poet commented on my post with something to the effect of, This is exactly when we need words. Write.
When writing about a societal injustice, I see two hurdles: one, finding a way to spend time with a tragedy that is hard to face long enough to write about it, and two, figuring out how to hook readers into spending time with you too.
For the first, my advice is to trick your mind.
Some tragedies are so heartbreaking that to take a long look at them hurts the soul and can even physically turn a person ill. Sometimes the only way to write about injustice is to play a trick on yourself. “Tell it slant” is how Emily Dickinson put it: “The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind—”
When I was a kid I experienced my first solar eclipse. My father was with me, and he let me wear his giant welding mask and made me a pinhole projector out of a cardboard box. I remember standing barefoot on my front lawn, my face pointing to the sky, the heavy mask pressing down on me, preferring its tinted glass and weight to the tiny hole and shadows on cardboard. Going slant can be like finding your welding mask, or making a pinhole projector. In poetry, this can be playing with a classic form, counting syllables, using a rhyme scheme, or arranging a found poem. These tricks can free, or protect, the poet from the subject—acting more like a game than a duty—long enough to write about it. To be clear, I’m not saying to make light of something serious. If you are reading this article, and you are looking for tips on how to write for social justice, then it is clear you are a person who cares, so what I’m saying is, give yourself a break.
In August 2011, I traveled out to the Sonoran desert to volunteer as a desert aid worker with the direct humanitarian organization, No More Deaths. For nine days I camped in the desert along the Arizona-Mexico border in 100+ degree temperatures. I often worried for my safety, but I knew it was nothing compared to what the people crossing into this country were experiencing. Everyday my heart broke with what I saw and heard, and every night I cried myself to sleep. I volunteered with the intention of writing about the border, but when I got back my home, writing was the last thing I wanted to do. It took me six months to a year to finally start writing poems, and when I did, I played tricks. I wrote a villanelle, I played with repetition, and in one poem I stole lyrics from a Katy Perry song. I was in part inspired by Kate Durbin’s collection The Ravenous Audience, which is teeming with different forms. Her collection showed me what could happen with a little experimentation.
“Our Lady of the Water Gallons” is a poem I wrote about the process of leaving fresh water on migrant trails. All summer long volunteers patrol the desert borderlands looking for people in distress and placing fresh water supplies in strategic locations. Volunteers write messages in Spanish and draw images like butterflies and crosses on the water gallons to communicate to those crossing that the water is safe to drink and not a border patrol trap. I found my way into this poem by experimenting with a made up long form created by my friend and formalist poet, Scott Miller, that uses repetition similar to a crown of sonnets.
To this day, anytime I know I’m going to read this poem in public, I have to practice it several times at home so I don’t cry, but I kind of hope every once in a while someone hears it and is inspired to donate money to humanitarian border causes, or even volunteer.
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the 2013 Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange poetry winner and a 2015 Barbara Deming Fund grantee. She has work published in American Poetry Review, crazyhorse, CALYX, and Acentos Review among others. A short dramatization of her poem “Our Lady of the Water Gallons,” directed by Chicano activist and Hollywood director, Jesús Salvador Treviño can be viewed at latinopia.com. She curates the quarterly reading series HITCHED and co-founded Women Who Submit. Her debut poetry collection, Built with Safe Spaces, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications.
Ashaki M. Jackson is a poet and social psychologist residing in Los Angeles. Her poem “An American Paratrooper” appears in [r.kv.r.y. quarterly‘s] April 2014 issue. Noted authors and Ashaki confidants Khadijah Queen (www.khadijahqueen.com) and Kima Jones (www.thenotoriouskima.com) recently pitched a few questions to her about her work – an ongoing reflection on grief, coping, and defunct mortuary rites grounded in her grandmother’s death.
This interview is reposted with permission from the editors of r.kv.r.y. quarterly where it was first published.
Khadijah Queen (KQ) begins a little late but gracefully: Snap! I got distracted by YouTube and middle school homework and cake and hot dogs… What distracts you most from your creative work, and how do you overcome said distraction(s) and/or use them to your advantage?
Ashaki Jackson (AJ): This day-to-day thing. I’m responding from bed while deep-conditioning my hair and jotting a To Do list for the next four hours.
Chicken is marinating. Dishes still aren’t going to wash themselves. This basket of clean laundry is giving me the side-eye. It is 5:30 PM.
Being swallowed by the mundane is very comforting to me. My writing revolves around personal loss — mainly that of my grandmother. I still reside in her memory and fold into my grief when I evoke her in poems. The feelings are oppressive even when I write about my broader reflection on loss as I did with An American Paratrooper. Inundating myself with a Big Bang Theory-spring cleaning-pedicure session or reading books in a loud restaurant gives me respite. It gives me spaces to tuck my grief until I’m ready to see it again.
KQ: Talk about the bodied-ness of your poems. How central, tangential, and/or inextricable are the physical and the linguistic?
AJ: I have bodies. Many bodies. Other peoples’ bodies. Loved ones’ bodies.
Sometimes it is the thought of the last state in which I saw a late loved one that pops into my mind.
This is a painful but helpful entry into my drafts. I also spent quite a bit of time studying anthropologists’ articles about mortuary rites. Cecilia McCallum, Ph.D., is a lasting favorite. She documents the care with which certain South American tribe members once treated their deceased family members’ bodies before consuming them.
I learned that mourning isn’t merely psychological; it is a ceremony, a meal, something that lingers on the palate. The language of consumption in relation to the lingering sense of loss underpins many of my pieces—devouring, preservation, and that sense of never being sate. Some of my poems read as if words are falling out of the mouth haphazardly. Others read as if I’m choking on the grief. I’m not able to articulate the craft, but thematically I might refer to it as written keening.
Kima Jones (KJ): Essentially, form is choosing skin, so I want to revisit Khadijah’s question on bodied-ness: Which form, which body do you like to take on most? And for your grandmother?
AJ: My good friend, Noah, mentioned that some of us “like to wear each other’s bodies.” We were speaking about recent travesties — Malaysian Flight 370, MV Sewol in South Korea, the Chibok girls. For all of those bodies lost, families only received apologies from officials — the emptiest gesture. Like gristle.
I think you crave a body — living or dead — particularly when you do not have one.
Bodies are tangible and to be cared for. That care is some kind of ritual.
My work doesn’t have a particular body. Forms are rare in my work. However, I allow my lines to occupy the page in non-traditional ways. One poem is written in the choppiness of a choking cry. In a different piece, the words collide at the bottom of the page – a visual homage to hopelessness in grief. The reader should want to gather words from these pieces, scrape them from the ground, and comfort them.
I spend a good amount of time thinking on my late grandmother’s passing. It aides my coping to wade through the memories, but it also gives me access to a dialect of grief that others might make use of in the future. In my manuscript, I write about her transition in various forms with the same sentiment about the body. She should be home, with us, and cared for. I don’t know if it’s the best I can do to evoke her in my pages as if my manuscript is her portable body. It is a start for me.
KJ: There is always something hiding, even in the uncovering and undoing. I am wondering how Ashaki keeps the secret things hidden during the excavation, the mining of all those graves?
AJ: I’m of the mind that the reader does not need to know me to enter, understand, experience, or relate to the work. Few books would ever be read with this requirement. What I need from the reader: trust. I might not hand you my articulated grief or reveal everything I’ve had to unearth to write a piece, but I’ll share work that will resonate in some way with the reader–that will rub the reader’s bruises just as my ache is continually touched.
KJ: It’s a question I’m turning over more and more in my head in regard to my own heart and my own good feeling, so I ask you, what is the use of the love poem?
AJ: Use of the love poem: praise for a body; idolatry; celebration of the mind’s fire; a method of serenading; to fully taste; to build a word altar to a moment; to sustain a beautiful feeling; to tuck a piece of candy in my pillowcase for later; to be reckless in my selfishness by flaunting; to maintain my warmth; to serve me.
I think that’s broad enough to comfortably fit my poems on grief and loss and loose enough to include the poems I have yet to write for the loves I have yet to know.
KQ: Truth & honesty– where on the spectrum when dealing with loss/grief do these consciously figure? Are they seeds or threads? Both? How much gives way to metaphor or story or construct?
AJ: I think Kima’s question about the use of a love poem is relevant here. If I were to write a love poem — let’s say “romantic” in some way — my approach could be seen as dishonest because I haven’t known love. I’d tell you that in the poem. I’m pretty forthcoming with what I don’t know. But, it would still be a decent poem because lies are often the most interesting genre.
When dealing with loss, I am more honest about what I have experienced than what I have not. I think my feelings are evident and even resounding when I write about personal loss because I know its labyrinth. I become the omniscient tour guide. When writing others’ losses: my empathy might seem insufficient. My feelings about documenting grief are still true and perhaps a projection of my mourning. But, I don’t know others’ specific pains, which are rooted in long relationships, family, home, and hopes for the future.
The lyric fills in those hollows. The poem becomes indigenous to its characters — not me. I am honest until my imagination converts a paratrooper’s body being retrieved from Cambodia into a native stork.
Dr. Ashaki M. Jackson is a social psychologist and poet who has worked with post-incarceration youth through research, evaluation and creative arts mentoring for over one decade. She is a Cave Canem and VONA alumna. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Rkvry Quarterly and CURA Magazine, among others. Miel Books will publish her chapbook, Language Lesson, in fall 2016. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
In my eighth grade classroom, a distinct culture had developed. Students were challenging one another’s privilege and entitlement at every opportunity, which was important but exhausting, and I was begin to wonder if my students had learned anything in my class. My students were testing my nerves, and although we still had several weeks left, I was ready for the year to be over.
Noriko Nakada edits the Breathe and Push column for Women Who Submit. She also writes, blogs, tweets, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Publications include two book-length memoirs: Through Eyes Like Mine and Overdue Apologies, and excerpts, essays, and poetry in Catapult, Meridian, Compose, Kartika, Hippocampus, The Rising Phoenix Review, and elsewhere.
