My poem "Colonial" is now online at Mithila Review.
It was a slow-burning poem: the spark was last spring's protests, but the fuse was the information about my ancestry that had come to light the previous fall, by which I mean that that all my life I had been used to thinking of myself as descended from immigrants on the margins and suddenly there was a recognizable name on the rolls of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. It was sort of a reverse Lovecraft. I decided the realities of the past did not change my responsibilities to the present and the future, but I would still have felt a lot less weird about fish people.
I wish I had not had to do the recording with a hard cold, but I love the choice of illustration: the same painting was the cover for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Talking to the Sun: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems for Young People (1985), which was almost the first book of poetry I owned. It introduced me to Edna St. Vincent Millay, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Frank O'Hara, of course.
I am especially glad to have the poem in company of this issue. Check out all the stories and poems and do not miss the editorial by Ishita Singh. Aliens and outsiders it is, always. And sometimes you are the insider, and that is the strangest of all.
It was a slow-burning poem: the spark was last spring's protests, but the fuse was the information about my ancestry that had come to light the previous fall, by which I mean that that all my life I had been used to thinking of myself as descended from immigrants on the margins and suddenly there was a recognizable name on the rolls of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. It was sort of a reverse Lovecraft. I decided the realities of the past did not change my responsibilities to the present and the future, but I would still have felt a lot less weird about fish people.
I wish I had not had to do the recording with a hard cold, but I love the choice of illustration: the same painting was the cover for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Talking to the Sun: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems for Young People (1985), which was almost the first book of poetry I owned. It introduced me to Edna St. Vincent Millay, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Frank O'Hara, of course.
I am especially glad to have the poem in company of this issue. Check out all the stories and poems and do not miss the editorial by Ishita Singh. Aliens and outsiders it is, always. And sometimes you are the insider, and that is the strangest of all.
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