from summer, with love

I’ve worked for Seattle-based poetry & bioregionalism nonprofit Cascadia Poetics Lab for over two years now. I have never considered myself a poet and never considered being a poet, my rambling, analytical brain instead living comfortably at the border of fiction and criticism. Until college, I will admit, I was a bit of a poetry-hater, as many fiction and prose writers tend to be (a sentiment reciprocated by poets toward prose writers, I’ve also learned). I started to find more interest in poetry after taking a “Sound and Literature” course in COVID Zoom college, where explorations of the writing styles of 70’s punks, dadaists and rap musicians lead me to poetic figures like Eileen Myles and Gil Scott Heron. Turns out writing is also music, and poetry is the gateway.

What started as a very part time administrative gig to get my foot in the door of Seattle’s arts and literary world has now turned into mostly-full-time job. It’s incredibly fulfilling and often exhausting work that has opened me to a broad world of poets, typographers, horticulturists, philosophers, professors, translators, indigenous cultural workers, art galleries…the list goes on. As an undergraduate student, I was enthralled by the academic literary world of ridiculously intelligent, dedicated people that are shamefully underpaid, leading me to abandon my pre-determined future in teaching in search of a place in this world of thinkers and creators. This position has exposed me to yes, the lack of pay and appreciation for some of the most in-tune, knowledgable and forward-thinking people I have ever encountered, but also the engaging, thought-provoking, welcoming and dynamic communities in which these people interact.

One of the ways in which CPL opens the organization to people that are perhaps not as in the know with the poetry world is through the yearly Poetry Postcard Fest. The premise is simple: sign up, get a list of 31 people around the world that also signed up, and send poems on postcards to them throughout July and August. The main criteria of the exercise is that participants cannot/should not pre-write the poems. Poems are supposed to be initial drafts, encouraging a more spontaneous approach to writing and the fight against our inner editor. This has been an incredibly useful approach to first-drafting my prose and journalism, as my work as an editor often bleeds into my confidence as a writer. It’s an exercise in trusting yourself, or trusting the muse, depending on your perspective. And since the size of the postcard limits the length of what’s being written, they can be pieces of a poem, fragments of a thought.

Since I work in the background of hosting this fest, I haven’t, in the past, put much effort into the postcard design or to writing on any specific theme. By the time I actually sit down to write something on a postcard, I’m burnt out from answering emails about postcards all day. This year, however, I had the time to collage all of my postcards, and decided to write about specific themes/images that I’ve been wanting to write songs about and haven’t had the time to, hoping to generate some lines that I can pluck from the poems to turn into song lyrics. The art doesn’t intentionally align thematically with the poems, and yet in some ways, it does. Here are a few.

Sacrificed to ambition, reality
at fingertips’ reach—Venus,
I’m looking for you. If I chase
and chase and chase, where does finality
lie—in a warm bathroom mirror staring back
with apathy.

A
love
so
demanding.
I am afraid
of your lonely
friends,
your hovering words,
waiting for a home. I
have bruised my knees
on too many pews to
hear your singing voice
again. Do you sing to her?

The potentially-dead body folded
next to the walk-up pizza window will do well
in my poetry. I’ll take
iphone pictures of screaming
graffiti to memorialize your suffering
on the digital plane.
Isn’t that the only way to feel?

24 hours a second, a constant,
constant burning into retinas,
shifting and shaping the malleable wrinkles
of a 12 year old brain. You were never
going to make any
friends, any-
way.