This month sees the rebirth of OCHO as A Journal of Queer Arts. I’m particularly thrilled to share pages with Valerie Wetlaufer and Alyse Knorr. I have three poems in this issue, two of which are brand new, and one of which has been looking for a home for some time.
Here’s the process statement I sent them: “These poems are outside of any of my main projects, but they are related to a chapbook I’m working on called Imaginary Kansas—an obsession on beloveds made distant by geography, identity anxiety, and a general culture of refusal. “If Odetta” is the oldest poem here, and it predates the Imaginary Kansas manuscript but shares its subject matter. “Nantucket” and “And then” are new poems, and it is interesting to me how the three of them form a narrative. A sad narrative, perhaps, but definitely one of borrowing from other sources, from imagination, from memory.”
Here’s some audio: