Foreword

The process of creating this project was one that centered around playing with language and allowing the page to become a playground in the same way that the canvas is the playground of the painter, or the eld is for the athlete. When I approached this project, I didn ’t want it to be just a chapbook that you read and maybe reread, but eventually forget how you interacted with it. I wanted my chapbook to be something you can experience beyond what you read, but with what you can possibly create inside and in between the pages I’ve shared with you today.

When I was workshopping some of the poems for this project, I was focused on experimenting and playing with my own approach to poetry-writing, seeing how I am already using language and discovering how I may learn to use it. And I think in that process of playing with my own writing style, I found myself exploring dierent aspects of my own perspective, aesthetic, and experience. This is something that I think may ring particularly well with other Black and/or Queer [and/or other marginalized] artists, who often nd themselves shoehorned into very specic topics and themes, and so I wanted to explicitly explore that multi-faceted sense of artistry within me, and to be able to loosely connect those things together without having to make my poems bleed each other to be in a shared space.

The themes I sought to explore in the poetry of the chapbook are best described by the subtitle of this project “The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Deathly. ” I wanted to make this space one where I could interact with the many facets of my experience, especially one that is Black and Queer and creative and wallower and the many other facets of what it means to be human. And in exploring these broad, interweaving themes in this chapbook, I also wanted to make the broader chapbook experience one that allowed my audience to interject themselves onto the page in ways beyond even my own imagining. No art is made in a vacuum, and even if I may never get to experience the art someone creates from atop my own work, I want to know a reality in which such a practice is well-loved and cherished by those who make art from my own.

I think the thing I experiment most with here is the collective space of the poems compiled here. Of course, I used caesura and varied line lengths in my poems in ways that have not typically been part of my poetry practice. You ’ll see this in the blank space between my words, and even in the alignment of lines or entire poems. Additionally, while I want the people reading this to annotate the poems and make all their own connections or artwork from them, I also wanted there to be space between the poems for folks to engage and create from their own hearts and minds and souls. So if you read one of my poems and you are called to doodle or sketch from it, I wanted there to be page space dedicated specically to that. If you want to write your own piece to bridge those gaps between the themes, the space exists for that as well. Even if not to create or add further art, it could be a space for my chapbook to come into the lives of readers, to write down a shopping list or a phone number or message, because poetry and art can be found and made from all these things in our daily lives that we sometimes forget. And in all of this space that was made, it could just be a moment to pause, to breathe, because sometimes, poetry is a lot, and while I hope you experience something new in each of my poems, you must do that on your own pace, regardless of my desires as the creator of these poems.

Having completed this poetry project, I see the little corner of the world in which my poetry exists continuing to be lled with color and metaphor and stories as I experience the things life has envisaged for me. This poetic endeavor was part of my last creative writing course in my undergraduate education, so my biggest hope is that the writing I craft from here on is full of breath—joyful and exhausted and furious and all. I cannot truly speak to what my writing and storytelling will look like one year from now, much less ten. But I hope to see my work engage more deeply with all the things that make up my experiences, and that I can connect them to at least one other person and inspire them to movement in ways they had long wanted to or never dreamed of before.

In all of the ways I choose to create and place my poetry in the world, I will work to protect my language, so that it remains uninhibited. As I play with themes and techniques and forms, I will endeavor to make my work stand steady in the face of the violent vacuums of the oppressive systems I create under. This is a part of my written heritage, as my predecessors have done before me, as my contemporaries do now, and as the newcomers will eventually do.