My best friend and I have taken to calling each other “weirdos.” In our world, calling someone a weirdo is the highest strata in the hierarchy of love and understanding.
I’ve often heard that the impulse to write feels like a creature clawing at your throat and fingertips. If your writing creature is a weirdo, I would like to hear from you and your cloudy friend.
By the way, what does your poet-creature look like? Mine is a sad plushie donkey with moon-eyes and a constant desire to whine.
We (my sad, bedeviled friend and I) would like to extend an invitation: bring the disintegrating generational memories, the volatile intersections of culture and identity, and the textures of the transcendental and surreal.
If you hear that strange chatter in your ear at night, ungodly and incandescent—
and you ask yourself things like, “If Jesus Christ were a maid of honor, would they wear a gold or blue dress?” Was that dress actually blue or gold? And why has the fashion industry become more openly unethical in the last five years?”
and then spiral on, yawning, whispering self-deprecations into the dark—
this is a call for you.
Mold a creature that shows up on my computer screen—grimy, blinking, unexpected but accessible.
Whether you feel fluent in the tongue of the Anglos, Saxons and Jutes, tell me how you’ve been underrepresented. Use that luminosity of two languages forming an epiphany.
Tell me about the time you became a vegetarian and showed up to Christmas dinner to find pork tamales.
Tell me about your Colombian gay uncle trying to figure out how to use “they/them” in a sentence and asking,
“Do them want a piece of cake?”
For the love of all that is weird, be unafraid to revel in hybridity. And yes, if I love lyrical imagery, I love exploratory narrative just as fiercely. Give me the spectacle of a life that is only yours. You don’t need tropes or cliches, because your poetry will find its relatability.
If I’ve learned anything in the past ten years, and it’s been a hell of a ten, what with the devil-spun propaganda of the last election and the post-COVID martyrdom of empathy it’s this:
The collective thrives in the individual.
Sometimes what you want to say is shrouded in shame, in societal and political inextricableness.
But take a moment. Disentangle yourself.
And say, “If it’s mine, and it carries truth, I should write it.”
Go boldly.
Stir up dialogue among the apathetic stars.
I encourage you.
I implore you.
And if you think your poetry editor is a weirdo, prove to me that you can be even weirder.
You fit in the slits and cracks of the forgotten and unusual. Tell me: do you see the world with soul? With curiosity? With a drop of hope amidst the cynics?
Congrats, you’re a weirdo too.
And yes, I’ll say it:
The monstrous—oh, the monstrous—is always clawing to come up
and do an interpretive dance on paper.
This time, I think you should listen to your creature. After all they know the ways you’ve been villainized, vindicated, and reborn as a misfit.
I promise, someday, you and your creature will find their place.
