the unmaking of the poem

on writing

today was the final workshop class that i took with Ariana Brown on the poetry manuscript, and we had a guest facilitator, the poet Sasha Banks, whose book we read throughout the time together. Sasha’s book, america, mine was one of my favorite poetry books i read in 2022, though it was published in 2020. Sasha took us through the process of putting together a manuscript, and her main suggestions on writing were play and letting the book write itself. go where the ideas take you, where the book wants to go, where does the book shift..

there are many ways to write a book, even if the publishing industry does not affirm this concept. one suggestion that sasha banks made is to create an annotated bibliography for the book. to name and thank the ancestors, the poets, those who nourished your words, your soul, and your mind while you worked, tell us who your people are.

who are those that brought you here?

as a reader, if i notice a name or book in the text i am reading, i make a note to look it up later. it is how i found many more writers and philosophers. how else would i, as a child of mexican and tejano parents, inheritance from farmers, in rural christian conservative texas, have found my way beyond the limits of a public school education, the Catholic church? my 7th grade English teacher let me borrow Interview with a Vampire, and i read it secretly and then went to the local library and found more of Anne Rice’s world of witches, vampires, and New Orleans. the library became a portal where i could walk in and out of places, see and know other things. it was a place to imagine.

in america, mine, what we find is a “refracturing of an already fractured landscape, and rebuilding it in a more honest image.”

i play solange’s “some things never seem to fucking work.”
My dad carries a dull yellow pocketknife in his pocket.
i fell in love with a Sagittarius who draws maps of places they visit.
There aren’t enough windows in the poems so I puncture the lines with knives to open up bigger portals in the language. 
i file my taxes and wash my car.
what can i build today? its only monday.