Three Poems by Thibault Raoult

Assume The Open-door Policy

Doesn't apply to moss, which, in the right

Hands, abstracts your everyday river.

I'm embarrassed, geographically,

To be the stuffed animal ritual. Shaking

Off panorama, intend to smell like fruit

You left way behind at your birth.

Disposable Epic

If they say there’s a mystery

Ingredient does that mean

There has to be one?

And if ghost latches on

To your residual leapfrog,

Where does that leave me Alan?

I understand my father

Ate mustard sandwiches.

Banks tune Wyoming.

The Only Ones Awake

There’s a mirror in gulf

And scraper for field.

Freeze: chimps

Aren’t toxic!

Way to gang up, Jazmín.

Funny how we repeat

Ourselves—tears

An equation.

Thibault Raoult's writings are forthcoming in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and 6x6. Projective Industries will release his chapbook, Communist Couplets, after the New Year. Thi lives in Athens, Georgia, where he studies in the English and Creative Writing PhD Program at UGA.

Three Poems by Cindy Carlson

If Emerald Could Be a Color a Sky Could Be

She peeled the wax back,

            from the museum statue

made string, hung bird whistles

            a single bed,

lay down boxes

            in a row of silver and traced

bears: polar and grizzly,

            realizing the sentimentality of

the color blue she

            called it Sunday, called it also

December, handed

            herself a cake made also

from something else.

            Cheer up she said, you

are Sunday, you

            are still—the sky also

turned something else

            not what she always wanted

not what she knew

            but erased and made

a scribbled red, just

            enough to say her place

and held there.

What to do with thousands of dead blackbirds; or that talk we had last Sunday

I’ve been sheen feather

sky, waiting to fly me

when starting they fall—

not float or all softly

two pounds of black: hard

on December. Blink eye and gather,

I pull bird to make body, in

wishness I teeter all edges then

over. Half light and hollow

like words I swing air, I swish

and toe tip, I flap and I fall—

fully for moments then

land all cemently, gaining

what always, they’ve known

all along.

Museum poem

           

Glass blocks attached only

by light to look through, changing

shapes, eyes to arms, I see you

like this: taking in color quiet

the walls gone/ escaped through

transparent then incandescent

we’re left in filaments, infinity,

held together with a knot

this room of strands and walls

(there again) holding what

has always been just breath

between words where our hands  

stutter and brush, a vibration

—the cubes are blue

and after hours they say

there will be a wedding—

       

the way the lake and wings are

fills my lungs with heat.

Cindy Carlson's poems have appeared in The Madison Review, Sentence Magazine, Shampoo, and other places.  She lives and teaches in Madison, WI where she also enjoys thinking about apple trees.

Two New Poems by and an Interview with Rob MacDonald

BODY COMMODIFICATION

At the yard sale, I saw that they were selling all my stuff. It was flattering to see so many people grabbing at my past, traffic blocked in both directions, strangers stopping and parking and leaving doors ajar. I was actually proud until I noticed how much haggling was going on: a quarter for my Mardi Gras beads, two bucks for my hunting permit, fifty cents for my whole hip-hop collection. This is a joke, I think I thought. All night, I sat in someone else’s yard, watching the slow erosion of my own existence. When a single mom bought my body, I objected, but my eyes, by that time, were cloudy marbles.

MEGALOMANIA

To make up for their bad behavior,

they bought me an Atari cartridge.

In Megalomania, you get to

design your own government—

purple for pseudodemocracy

and violet for totalitarianism.

The people flicker in predictable patterns.

Give the music a minute to sink in—

it has no beginning or end.

I’m not winning. It’s a 1-player game.

In the ad, it seemed so much more

exciting, so much less predestined.

They say I can stop playing

as soon as everyone is happy.

GL: Your terrific manuscript in progress, Situation Normal, features poems that often recount bizarre and disturbing events in a “normal” voice, that is, a kind of eerie deadpan that tries but fails to enforce normality (control, order, stability) through its tone. Thus the normal, in this sense, functions to keep strange phenomena from spiraling apart, but it also (often) signals an emotional disconnect between the speaker and the churning world at hand. He talks, in other words, like everything is fine, normal, etc., even when it’s not. This mode creates both disturbing and hilarious results, but I’m more curious about the disturbing in these poems. What, then, are some ideas or manifestations of “the normal” from the world/country/mediascape that inspire/scare you into writing these not-so-normal poems?

RB: I feel like the real world is full of scary stuff that somehow becomes part of the backdrop of everyday life. We’ve got climate change and disease and egomaniacal dictators all lurking around the corner—I don’t think there’s any shortage of signs that things are seriously broken. Hollywood keeps making apocalyptic films, and zombies never seem to get old. It’s a strange dynamic, because we’re fascinated with fictional disasters, but in order to get through each day of showering and going to work and buying groceries, we’ve got to turn a blind eye to the real, looming disasters. And, of course, the corporate machine has plenty of incentive to condition us to either ignore impending doom or view it as entertainment. Romans and lions all over again, I guess.

GL: The first poem in SN, “Bucket Sort,” is a wonderful ars poetica in which the speaker imagines being “buried under” the weight of his life/words; beneath that shattering but inevitable burden he finds “the darkness beautiful, / the view peculiar, / the weight of it awful.” Could you tell me why the simultaneous presence of these three things is so important to your poetry?

RB: The relationships among those three elements make life interesting, right? We’ve got to accept mortality and find some way to enjoy the ride. Appreciate the little things while atrocities are being committed. Live as if we have all the answers, even though none of the big mysteries have been solved. Every single time I stop to think about it, I’m overwhelmed and terrified and grateful all at once. In terms of the poetry, I guess I’m constantly trying to make sense of things, and I hope that even when I admit to a reader that I’m feeling lost and small, we can take a deep breath together and enjoy some of the strange magic that’s way beyond our comprehension.

GL: In the poem “Shame,” you write, “Privacy is exquisite / because none of us / wish our flaws public.” But your poem moves from this playfully cynical axiom to a more cryptic and creative reformulation of the problem of privacy in the final stanzas:

 We can’t bear to see
 ourselves upside-down
 in a soup spoon
 at a sidewalk café.

 This is why Halloween
 is sacred: none of us
 wish our privacy
 confined to phantasm.

What is the risk of having “our privacy / confined to phantasm”? Do you see our privacy in the new century/millennium as becoming more and more phantasmal— spectral, unreal—because it is increasingly encroached upon? And does poetry help protect or generate a kind of privacy separate from the forces that want to destroy it?

RB: It’s mostly a call to honesty—let your monsters loose, turn yourself inside out and wear your ugliness. We’re all broken and in over our heads, but we’re supposed to fake it most of the time and act like we’ve got our shit together. It’s exhausting to hide all your flaws, though, so I love the idea of taking a day, as a society, to be collectively and brutally honest with one another. That’s not exactly what Halloween’s about, but it could be—a day to make sure that we don’t die without letting the world know who we really are.

I’m not really looking at “privacy” in the wiretapping sense of the word. In the poem, I’m thinking more about the tension between how we feel and what we say. You’re not going to find a lot of poetry in prepared statements from politicians or post-game interviews with athletes. It’s awful to hear language used in those ways, right? That sort of contrived, stock-phrase bullshit shows up in poetry, too, unfortunately. The stuff that I enjoy reading is like the opposite of a press conference. It’s more like a conversation with someone who’s falling asleep at the wheel—all surprise, no filter.

GL: Many of your poems are concerned in complex, ironic ways with authentic, or “real” experiences. Your speakers don’t always know what aspects of subjective experience they should count as truly belonging to them. For example, the speaker of “Where the Self Resides” says this in the final lines: “Tell me again / how nearly alive I really am.” What prevents this speaker, or the other voices in your MS, from realizing (in all senses) how alive they really are? What makes it so difficult for them to answer this question from themselves?

RB: About a third of the poems in Situation Normal are about the process of searching for identity, and different poems deal with different parts of that process. Some of the characters are just opening their eyes, while others are confronting big doubts at the end of life. I’m not sure that there’s one answer to your question, but you’re right that I’m interested in the impossible task of understanding where each of us fits into a world that, ultimately, is a total mystery. In the particular poem you mention, it’s a matter of facing death and saying, “I know I wasn’t perfect, but how did I do?” I guess I worry that I won’t be able to answer that question for myself. And, despite my best efforts at anything resembling religious faith, I’m not convinced that anyone will be there to answer it for me.

GL: You are editor of Sixth Finch, which has quickly become an essential presence in the poetry world. How have the goals, reach, and content of SF changed since you smashed a champagne bottle against its hull just a few years ago?

RB: (Your question makes me think of the scene in Caddyshack where Mrs. Smails christens The Flying Wasp, but I’ll try to get beyond that and give you a real answer.)

I hope that the goals for Sixth Finch haven’t changed—I still want to bring great work to a new audience, and I still want to build stronger connections between poets and artists. The reach, thanks to lots of amazing people, has definitely changed. Our readership has grown exponentially, and it’s nearly all due to word-of-mouth. In terms of the content, I’m sure that the aesthetic is constantly shifting—people are sending us a lot of work that takes risks, and the submissions that get me most excited are often the ones that remind me of nothing I’ve ever seen before. I’d love to keep publishing brave work that really stands out.

GL: So what’s new with Rob MacDonald these days? What are you writing, reading and thinking about? What new projects are in the offing?

RB: Recently, I’ve been reading stuff from Heather Christle, Jordan Stempleman, Matt Hart, Emily Pettit, Zach Schomburg, Timothy Donnelly, Leigh Stein, Dan Magers…too many to list. I read a ton of different journals, too, and I’m always excited to discover poets—Chelsea Whitton and Meghan Privitello are just a couple of new favorites. I’m good at reading, writing and thinking, but probably not as good at projects. (Dottie Lasky’s great essay, “Poetry Is Not a Project,” helps me feel slightly less inadequate about that.) My approach to the business of poetry has been ridiculously passive. When an editor of a journal asks for some poems, I send some over. When someone asks me to be part of their reading series, I give a reading. I have this crazy idea that if I just keep writing good poems, I’ll eventually get an email from one of my favorite presses saying, “Hey, can we put out your book?” Writing is so much more interesting than submitting, but I’m working toward a healthy balance. And while I’m finding a home for Situation Normal, I’m happy to just keep writing new poems.

 Rob MacDonald lives in Boston and is the editor of Sixth Finch. His poems can be found in Octopus, notnostrums, Sink Review, esque, H_NGM_N and other journals.

Four Poems by Leslie Anne Mcilroy

Dismember

It’s not the blood, it’s the separation, the part
of a whole left to crawl across the floor
looking for its body. It’s the foot
used as a doorstop, the arm holding up
a lampshade, the head in bed with the small man
who strokes its fine hair and whispers
love notes in its shriveling ear. It’s the storing
of limbs in the freezer, the old woman
rocking, humming and chewing a hand.

It’s the cries of men — no morphine, no arm.
the empty pant leg blowing in the wind,
the basket of parts. It’s the phantom tingling
below the joint and the rub of the stump
and its round, raw skin. It’s the grainy
video scream as the hooded captor saws
at the neck "Allah Akbar!” god is great.
It’s the 12-year-olds with machetes
crossing the Sudan, hacking. It’s the look
of shock on the decapitated face.
It’s the twitching.

It’s the girl losing some piece of herself right now
in an explosion, a rape, a gangrenous disease.
It’s the boy burying what’s left. It’s your cousin
being fitted for a plastic prosthetic,
picturing his lover caressing the stub.
It’s the author writing a best-selling thriller
about a killer who collects clits in a butterfly box,
the butcher who grinds fresh meat, the nanny
who pays good money for a soup bone.



Big Guns

They leap from hands, hot and jumpy,
looking for something with fur and big eyes,
something that can’t talk, or won’t —
the thrust of a child into oncoming traffic
to play chicken with the school bus.
Smitten with danger, we lick the drippings
of a Molotov cocktail, the wet smell
of burn, gas and rag of it. Smoke.

Set fire. Set fire to this dress of soiled peach.
Red is what we want. Freedom red.
Fight for freedom. It’s worth dying for,
especially if you win. And everyone
will say so as they salute and shoot
again, aiming at the sun, the fire
nuzzling up to the center like a bright pink whore,
brilliant in the shine of blister and skin.
Two shades shy of a venereal crisis,
lips swollen with the bruise of malevolence,
our wingspan is wide and the meltdown
gracious, as we near what will later be called
our big waxed death.

Still, there’s something small about it, hate.
How it lingers on the skin, sours the eggs,
makes us mouth words to ourselves alone
in our cars, slogans of god and country,
human/civil/animal rights, the small
lump in our throats as we tell the story,
the things we do with triggers
that make us big.



The Song She Knows

Wild, wild quiet. Trees and slim deer fondling grass,
lakes and soft dirt roads. Words like “dappling”

and “glimmer” seem rich, even useable. My laptop,
dim blue, looking for a leafy metaphor for broken,

a way to say I can’t forgive you that is lovely and wet.
The fish are swimming. The birds, nesting. Our daughter,

lifting leaves with a stick, chasing spiders, wonders
at the suspicious green as I close in on myself.

Grease and gravity. Glass heart eye. Cinder block sky.
I hate this — nature, the song — snapping twig/winged rise/

wooded rain/earthen birth. In the city — rust-belted,
bottomless — things die and god willing, stay dead.



How I Came To Love The Apocalypse
         For Karen Tozzi-Colberg

Her house still smelled like ham
and her heart felt like sandpaper.
She painted something flowery and hot,
and hung it on her wall to remind her
of the lips she’d tasted, the drinks
she’d poured. She gave the painting
away because it spoke too loud
and then dreamed that John Cusack
stuck her vita on his refrigerator
because he wanted to know her.
She wanted to know him, too,
but the world was ending
and she needed to wash
her brushes, set the bugs free,
and introduce birth and death
so they’d recognize each other
when they met.





Leslie Anne Mcilroy won the 2001 Word Press Poetry Prize for her full-length collection Rare Space and the 1997 Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Gravel. She also took first place in the 1997 Chicago Literary Awards Competition judged by Gerald Stern. Her second full-length book, Liquid Like This, was published by Word Press in 2008. Leslie’s work appears in numerous publications including American Poetry: The Next Generation, Dogwood, The Emily Dickinson Award Anthology, The Mississippi Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose & Poetry and Pearl. Leslie works as a copywriter in Pittsburgh, PA, where she lives with her daughter Silas, and writer/guitarist, Don Bertschman, with whom she performs her poetry.

The four poems published above originally appeared in Liquid Like This.

Bones That Looked Like Me: an interview w/ Leslie Anne Mcilroy

I dreamed last night
that your face pressed
against the skin of my belly
and I could see your eyes
wide open, bones
that looked like me.

(from “Surrender”)

GL: Your second full-length collection of poems, Liquid Like This, begins with an epigraph from Carole Maso: “Of course she goes too far. / There’s nowhere else for her to go.” This notion of being forced by circumstance to go too far seems essential to your work. In what ways does your poetry respond to having “nowhere else to go” but “too far”? And to what extent do you think people and poets find or define themselves in moments of exaggeration, desperation, extremis?

LM: I don’t think of going too far in terms of exaggeration/drama as much as a kind of learned internal truth — something that intrinsically works. It is what is known about the self and the struggle to be present in the world. I’m not saying it is smart or good or right — always. In fact, it can be sad, come from a place of desperation, as you note. On the other hand, for me it feels mostly bold and honest and uncompromising — risk taking. The speaker, to be true to herself, cannot go halfway or even just all the way. She has to give everything to feel alive and true — jump in with two feet. This is a way I try to write — and live. It’s not pretty and I am often disappointed when I find myself writing around something that I am maybe afraid or unable to say out loud. I know I have to go further. The poems I admire most take that step.

It is not that I disdain modesty and decency and sound judgment. I like to think I have those, too, just that this tactic doesn’t often serve me well in my creative/relational life. I value it and would never intentionally hurt another in the name of pushing through, but I am also deaf to polite and pretty poems/people. They don’t enter in/make a mark.

The poems/poets that stick with me aren’t extreme (in some cases I wish they were) as much as they are willing to say what needs to/can’t be said. I always go back to Lucille Clifton’s “Moonchild”: “jay johnson is teaching/me to french kiss, ella bragged, who/
is teaching you? how do you say; my father?” It kills me that she can say this so simply and beautifully and that the moon is the poem’s metaphor and it shines so pure and bright through all this ugly. It goes so very far.

If you go too far, you can always come back (at least in a poem); if you don’t go out there, you’ll never know.

GL: There’s a terrific and ghoulish poem, “Dismember,” near the beginning of the book that provides an eerie counterpoint for the way the body is often treated in Liquid Like This. Many poems in this collection portray the body as a kind of magnificent but doomed device that offers fleeting promises to satisfy desires while simultaneously altering or frustrating those desires. In “Dismember,” on the other hand, the speaker contemplates the way the body is severed, appropriated, and/or destroyed for perverse, malicious or tragic reasons. The poem features a litany of gothic scenarios, including images of amputees, a “hooded captor” beheading a hostage, a serial killer collecting trophies in a box, and other nightmarish but realistic predicaments. What I’d like to know is: Why is this dark and somewhat atypical poem of yours featured so prominently and close to the beginning of the book? And how does “Dismember” inform the book’s more erotically focused exploration of the body?

LM: I love this poem: the images, the rawness, the ugliness. I think it is a good poem — my simple explanation for its prominent positioning in the book. I love it because it comes from my longtime, graphic fear of dismembered body parts, which began when I was a child and remains long after I discovered my erotic self. What I found as I wrote the images that haunt me (I slept with the light on for months during the Jeffrey Dahmer case) was that in a textbook psychology way, it has to do with a fear of not being whole or connected, an exploration of the many ways people are damaged by separation — how identities are formed in pieces that don’t talk to each other — how we can be so distant from ourselves.

Or worse yet, how two parts of the self can be so contradictory and still exist in the same space. Identities are complex but we often reduce them to a simple character we can hold on to — and then they change.

I feel like the graphic, “gothic,” violent images of tearing/cutting the body apart are significant in that they speak to the real atrocities/horrors that take place every day. People DO THIS to one another. There is the doing and the done to and they are equally terrifying. It surpasses everything I know, except what I might do if someone tried to hurt my daughter. That’s another poem.

I have taken some crap for the last line, “the nanny who pays good money for a soup bone,” but I believe that if we thought about the daily massacre of animals — what it is we really do to a cow — if we looked in that beautiful animal’s eyes as we chopped off its head — we would be forced to see that every time we ate a piece of beef, and feel it. Yes, I am a vegetarian.

Finally, I am very close to my body — it is central to the way I live. I don’t understand it sometimes, but I am uniquely focused on it because I am a Type 1 diabetic, which means I have been monitoring my health, diet, weight and blood sugars for 30 years now. I don’t get to escape my body and all the variables that affect it. I pay consequences for ignoring it. I struggle. The body is a beautiful and terrifying thing — the things it does, the things we do to it, the things we do to each other. Pleasure and pain walk together in much of what I know and express — very much so erotically. I don’t really know how else to explain that.

GL: Your poem “Sexicon” investigates the words and expressions we use to build a language of love and lust. After first mentioning some conventional phrases for orgasms, like “the small death” and “angels flying,” the speaker searches “for something better to explain/the panic/calm, fierce/sweet, fire/ash of us,” a word that can not only call to mind, but even achieve sexual consummation, with its mere utterance. Why is this ambition, finding language sufficient to the task of representing or even reenacting sexuality, of such crucial importance to your work?

LM: For me “Sexicon” is about a universal call to love explored through the power of unrestrained sex — it is hyperbolic, but need not be. It was informed, in part, by these back-and-forths I have with my daughter: “I love you,” “I love you more,” “I love you bigger than the world,” “I love you bigger than the sky,” and one day she countered, “I love you 140 universes.” It stayed. And for me (though one might not believe it) the best of our sexual beings is always brought forth by love — and trust, and vulnerability. How much would you give for your partner to look at you wide-eyed and say without abandon, “I love you 140 universes,” and mean it?

Something Bigger than Love. This is a phrase from “Sexicon”, that my lover, Don Bertschman, and I have adopted as our code. It is a reaching, a calling, a truth that can only be found if you are open and honest and seeking and desirous and willing. I wear a ring with SBtL engraved on it, a tattoo on my back, and now, a necklace. It is something I believe in — that we can give one another a consciousness and break old patterns (love the Andrea Gibson poem, “Stay” about this), which have held us captive. We can choose one another without anyone telling us what form that needs to take, AND we can trust one another in a way that challenges our very core. Trust is hugely important. When you give yourself wholly to another person you need to know that you are safe in that giving. It comes back to the “too far.” You have to take risks, be present, be honest to love — physically, emotionally and spiritually — that big. If you, like I, want to experience love at that level, I believe you have to go that far.

GL: Many poems in Liquid Like This use the second person or use the second person address at some point. Why do those moments happen in your poems (when you turn to a specific “you”) and which would you say is the greater motivation for you as a poet: to address others or yourself: Examples of this can be found in "Heart Time" (at the conclusion), "Best Fuck II," (great titles), "One Blue Second" (in the middle), "Headed South," "Winner Takes All," (the “you” who's kissed), "Surrender," "How Did it End," "I Don't Want to Write about You Anymore," "Gone Missing," "Keep Breathing" (at the end), "Nothing's free about Verse," "The Poem in You," "I Wasn't Surprised at All," and "Again."

LM: The audience is always a big factor for me. I write for myself, yes, but the only reason to share this is that it might make another feel/see/engage/change. It’s a form of connecting that is hugely important to me. If I can’t talk to YOU, who am I talking to? When I write, it is almost embarrassingly autobiographical. I lack the leap of imagination to walk outside myself, which is central to a lot of poems I love. I try and almost always fail.

Still, within the autobiographical, there is an energy that forces me to address the other, to acknowledge that I am not here alone in this and someone has brought me/come along with me to this experience or way of thinking, and because my “I” is very much MY “I,” I want them to hear me. I want them to LISTEN — even if they never read the poem. I feel the need to address/invite/engage the other as part of the narrative, to help inform the whole picture. Often the “you” is easily identifiable. In most cases, it a partner/lover, who can then be extrapolated to the universal “you” depending on the experience of the reader.

I try to write from what I know and the “you” is always part of that. This might explain why I rarely write in the third person …

GL: The last poem in the book, “Heart Time,” the speaker tells us she has been “hearing [her] heartbeat…[i]n [her] dreams, in the city wind, on the radio,” which prompts her to count everything, and then claim “…I can measure beauty this way, / by counting my presence in this final world.” These are fabulous lines, and I wonder if they provide us with an ars poetical account of your core aesthetics. How does your poetry attempt count your presence into this world?

LM: It’s funny that you ask that. I perform “Heart Time” and in rehearsing, asked my musical collaborators if in hindsight, that line, “I can measure beauty this way, / by counting my presence in this final world,” sounded egotistical. I worried that I did not really think it through when I wrote it. What I meant was not that beauty is only measured by how much I count in this world, but that how much beauty I leave IS how much I count — it’s what I’ve given, what I’ve left after I go. I love that it is pretty, but if you really think it through, it’s semantically unclear. I have a wild need to leave something beautiful — to add to the beauty in this world, to be a part of it — I want to be that beautiful thing.

GL: When I was an undergrad at Pitt, I was introduced to poetry by writers like Jeff Oaks and Jan Beatty, whose work displayed a fierce attachment to Pittsburgh. I came to think of them, and several other (otherwise rather diverse) writers, like Judith Vollmer, Terrance Hayes, Jim Daniels, and Sharon McDermott, as being a part of a regional literature. The tenets of this literature, I would argue, include: locating the reader in very specific places of interest, like the Cage, the Pegasus, on Forbes Avenue, waiting for the 61C bus, etc; using river and bridge imagery; both celebrating and mourning the city’s gothic, post-industrial architecture and atmosphere; bars; music, specifically blues and erotic rock lyrics; and exploring sexual and sensual imagery. To what extent you 1) believe there is such a Pittsburgh aesthetic? 2) locate yourself within that aesthetic or 3) try to complicate and/or write away from that aesthetic? (Sorry about all the aesthetics!!)

LM: OOOOOOOH — I LOVE Pittsburgh. It is so rich to me, but I feel like I am faking it when I try to adopt the working-class, steel mill history, the industrial meat of it. I come from a middle-class family, though I am a third-generation immigrant, my grandfather (on my mother’s side) was a draftsman and my grandmother a writer. I have nothing but love for the work ethic of Pittsburgh, having been employed since I was 12 (at Fox’s Pizza Den, Burger Chef, some crazy Elaine Powers exercise place, selling magazines on the phone for a lunatic, babysitting — it seems fitting now that I bartended for 10 years with my three Carnegie Mellon degrees).

I like the brutal determination of Pittsburgh, the skylines and the hills — the weather. I love the poetry of the landscape — the bridges and rivers. I love the parks (I run in Frick nearly every day with my dog), and the way, when people say we are pedestrian, I get to point to the exact same people you note as counterpoints: Jan Beatty, Terrance Hayes, Jeff Oaks and Jim Daniels, whom I studied under as an undergraduate at CMU. They are in my blood. They are a pulsing part of Pittsburgh. I am happy here.

And yes, there is a Pittsburgh aesthetic and I hope I am a part of it. I don’t feel a need to distance it. I don’t care for the Steelers /Pirates/Penguins, I don’t eat pierogies or kielbasa. I don’t dine at the Dirty O or Pramanti’s, but it is in Pittsburgh where I have met the most beautiful, creative, artistic, energizing people in my life. I raise my daughter here in hopes that this energy finds her. And I know it will.

GL: So what’s been new with you since Liquid Like This appeared two years ago? Are you writing away from those poems? Or has your work since been a continuation of the poems in that book? What are you reading, writing, thinking?

What is new? Performance, I guess. I have begun memorizing my poems so that I can deliver them in a way that focuses on emotional connection rather than simply transference of ideas, words, images, feelings. If I KNOW a poem, I can emote, use my body (back to the body), think about timing and effect. I can fully realize what I am trying to say and share that.

LM: I have been lucky enough to work with musicians (Don Bertschman, Danny Morrow) who add a new dimension to my work. It is so freeing to collaborate with artists who share an aesthetic and then raise the bar with musical influences that take the poem to another level. Sometimes I rework the poem for a performance — add things, repeat things, accentuate the melody of the words. Mostly I concentrate on making sure my poems work as hard on the stage as they do on the page. I still want them to stand up to academic scrutiny/poetic craft, but I want to deliver them the way you would to a friend over a glass of wine, from the heart — passionate and true.

Last year I took on the challenge of writing a poem a day for National Poetry month in April. That exercise lead to a lot more writing (not all good), and a devotion to the process I was lacking. Since, I have been working on those poems and others (I am a big believer I revision) to compile a new book, sending out a lot more (getting a lot more rejections) and am writing grants to fund a larger project that has been in my mind for more than five years now: a performance piece dealing with diabetes, bulimia and motherhood. It has yet to get funded, but I know if it does, I can write/perform a piece that will be powerful in the way that Sekou Sundiata’s “Blessing the Boats” or Caroline Rothstein’s “Faith” promises to be.

I speak from my heart and rarely from intellect (I suck at arguing politics, but swear to god I know what is right and wrong). I don’t read as much as I’d like, but in the last years have been given the gift of Jeannette Winterson and Carole Maso. I always return to Lucille Clifton, Terrance Hayes, Tim Seibles, Sekou Sundiata, Martín Espada, Linda McCarriston, Scott Fitzgerald and James Baldwin. Most recently, I have discovered Ada Limon, Erika Meitner and Cheryl Dumesnil.

Each morning I read “Verse Daily” and “Poetry Daily,” giving me a poetic jumpstart to foil my retail, copywriting world. I have explored the slam scene and don’t do so well there — I think my material is not a good fit for the audience — but that, too, has greatly informed my presentation. I think a lot about what it is I want to achieve with my writing and what devotion/sacrifice it will take me to get there.

Sometimes I regret not getting my MFA/Ph.D. and being an active part of the academic/poetry world. Other times I regret not being the soul artist that puts her art first. Then I remember that I have 3 books and a daughter and a home and a lover, my family and my beautiful friends. I remember I have made choices that came from my own truth, my own needs, my desires and limitations. I think a lot about mortality and take comfort in knowing that no matter what happens, I have lived as true and whole as I know how to be. I pray that it gets truer and wholer each day.



Leslie Anne Mcilroy won the 2001 Word Press Poetry Prize for her full-length collection Rare Space and the 1997 Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Gravel. She also took first place in the 1997 Chicago Literary Awards Competition judged by Gerald Stern. Her second full-length book, Liquid Like This, was published by Word Press in 2008. Leslie’s work appears in numerous publications including American Poetry: The Next Generation, Dogwood, The Emily Dickinson Award Anthology, The Mississippi Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose & Poetry and Pearl. Leslie works as a copywriter in Pittsburgh, PA, where she lives with her daughter Silas, and writer/guitarist, Don Bertschman, with whom she performs her poetry.