What first drove me forward in drafting poems was the chase of a good image. The goal was to create a surprise, an upheaval, a disruption into awareness. As my work deepened and my devotion to my aesthetic intensified, the chase evolved into exploring and advocating for ways of knowing that exist outside of or counter to what dominant systems of knowledge preach, accept, require.
A further deepening has come now after difficult and painful reflections into the circumstances and stories and people I come from.
My poems argue for resistance and refusal, for multiplicity and for change.
My poems reject linearity even as they acknowledge the paradoxes they inhabit and inherit.
My poems live in the pivots, the micro-moments that transition us—in fits and starts—further from ignorance and closer to consciousness.
It’s the vigilance in that space where my poems commemorate their little birthdays and festivals and funerals.
No one else will decorate for them.
No one else will remember.
