Five miles from Buchtel
the snow has turned to rain,
the creek laps the edges of the road.
Tomorrow the ground
will freeze again, flood
trapped, no place to go
—from "Rt. 13, Late May," Volume 62, Issue 4 (Winter 2021)
Tell...
I drop my daughter off at her first day
of preschool—re-opened after a year closure.
Masked teachers, unvaccinated children.
—from "Preschool Sonnet during the Pandemic," Volume 62, Issue 4 (Winter 2021)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first poem I wrote that was published in a literary journal was titled, “The Lust of Emperors,” and it was about how soldiers are sacrificed during war, and it includes a memory of my dad, who was drafted to fight in the American war in Vietnam.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I have been deeply influenced by an older generation of Pacific Islander writers, including Albert Wendt, Haunani-...
Milkmen returned to their jobs.
Sales of private jets and air purifiers went through the roof.
There were shortages, but they were short-lived:coins, toilet paper, bleach.
—from "Things I Forgot to Tell You about the End of the World," Volume 62, Issue 4 (Winter 2021)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
One of the first poems I remember writing was when I was seven years old. We lived near the Oak Ridge National Labs (and my father consulted there) where some nuns just a few years ago were arrested for protesting building nuclear weapons, or the nuclear waste, or just trespassing on the grounds? Something. Anyway, to me it was a very sinister seeming place. I wrote a very clever (I thought) poem about...
My first real job: barmaid.
I stood: I stared. I poured
cabernet: I dried expensive
wine glasses with a chamois cloth
—from "Psalm," Volume 61, Issue 3 (Fall 2021)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I made my first chapbook when I was five, with colored construction paper and yarn: a short allegorical story called “A Magical Christmas” about a young girl who goes Christmas shopping with her grandmother and who manages to keep the gift she chooses for her a secret until Christmas Day. Then I gave the chapbook to my grandmother for Christmas, a nested narrative. There were many plot points that didn’t cohere, but she loved it. That experience enabled me to internalize a reader.
Look, I'm alive. And this park, Wright Park it's called—a scrappy woodland just a half mile down the road from my home—is alive too, living and dying at once, whether I'm there to see it or not.
—from "Wildflower Season," Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I have boxes full of notebooks of various kinds—diaries with a tiny lock and key, black-and-white speckled Mead notebooks, plaid clothbound books with too-tight bindings, and sleek Moleskines. These are full of barely legible writing that has always felt like a lifeline to me, the only way to make any sense of the overwhelming chaos of just living and being and the relentless passage of time. They are...
