Tag Writing Family

New publication: family & fracture; second orange prose poem

onpapercuts 2 Comments

“Here are the sheets pulled flat on the bed we all share, vertical stripes, thin and thick, orange, yellow, orange, yellow.”

This is a picture of my newborn with his father. My latest prose poem Baby Picture in the new issue of Platypus Press’ Wildness, is based on — you guessed it — a baby picture. I wrote this last year before I was pregnant. It is about the distance between my father and me, which is a spot on my heart too sore for me to say more about here. It is surreal to have this piece published so soon after giving birth to my first child — a child who has my face; a face I inherited from my father. My child’s relationship with his father will be very different from the one I have with mine. The long tides between families, circles broken and unbroken through time, are always on my mind but hard to write about. This piece is the closest I’ve come yet. I hope you like it.

Continue reading “New publication: family & fracture; second orange prose poem” →

New publication: family & fracture; third orange prose poem

onpapercuts 2 Comments

cactus di jayawickrema matchbook lit

III.

“My eyes are shut, the insides of my eyelids are orange in the light streaming through. I’ve come to believe orange is the color of vast, unbroken love.”

My latest hybrid/prose poem, Cactus, now up at matchbook, is to my mind, the third in my loose series of “orange prose poems” as the rest of the piece troubles the opening quoted above as well as the series’ theme of family and unbrokenness.

I almost didn’t publish this piece. It’s my first explicit “personal as political” publication, and I tied myself into knots writing, editing, and submitting it. I felt guilty using some of my family’s history, which may not be mine to interpret. I felt guilty about not explicitly naming the harms I dance around. Among other things, the piece is about guilt as a stalling act. Continue reading “New publication: family & fracture; third orange prose poem” →

New publication: family & fraction; first orange prose poem

onpapercuts 2 Comments

I.

“Let’s say the wrapper was orange-yellow — the color of sunset on Galle Face Beach where you took me every Sunday, the color of the hibiscus growing by the tall iron gate of the last home I lived in with you.”

My favorite part of writing is learning the meaning of a piece on the long road between drafting and publication. This is partly why I hold onto pieces for awhile before submission. I wrote my latest prose poem, Let’s Say Your Arm is Long now up at Pithead Chapel, last summer. It is about my grandfather who died when I was five. My few memories of him are likely false ones. I didn’t know at the time that I was writing this piece to comfort myself but it has become a comfort: a sort of lullaby to myself; an elegy to him. Through it, I’ve come to know that mourning can be a way of continuing love, that your body remembers love your mind doesn’t. I realized writing this piece in the subjunctive mood made it possible to build a frame around a loss I couldn’t otherwise grasp. Continue reading “New publication: family & fraction; first orange prose poem” →