SHANNAN

Beauty and terror appear to play a game of hide and seek in your poems. In “Meditations in an Emergency,” you conjure “flowers that are equally beautiful in life / and death”. In “Ode to Friendship” there is “a skyline / of abandoned buildings.” These both point to the “ruin and possibility” you explore. Opposites become lovers, teasing and testing the other. In “Mess,” the body is both a song but it also “run(s) dry” like a river. These opposing forces add tension to the poems, heightening the reader’s awareness of the narrative. So these elements work threefold – image, metaphor, and juxtaposition. When constructing your poems, do you begin from a specific element — image, idea, memory, or thought, for example — or do these elements form in tandem with each other? Which is to ask, where do poems come from? And why do you write?

MICAELA

In my work, I use contrast often — even though I think that the whole idea of darkness making the light shine brighter is kind of clichéd. I will admit, however, that in my early 20s, I learned that a lot of clichés are actually true. Going outside does help with my depression! (But please don’t tell a depressed person to do that.)

What’s interesting to me is that the opposing forces in my poems don’t usually clash as much as I think they will. “Meditations in an Emergency” feels like an exception. I really tried to set up hard-hitting juxtapositions in that piece because I wanted deviation — from heterosexuality, namely — to be what primarily moved the poem along. In my other pieces, though, I’m surprised by the harmony with which the “opposites” exist — whether that’s ruin and possibility, celebration and despair, music and silence. I think that multiple truths exist at once, and that ultimately, we get to choose which ones to live by.  

My poems used to grow around a single line — a nucleus of sorts. I used to begin by figuring out the loudest thing I wanted to say, and then worked around that. These days, though, I’m discovering other ways to walk into a poem, such as by doing iterative, handwritten free writes, or rescuing abandoned drafts. I’ve been saying for years that a poem is a house with no doors, but many windows — there’s no one right way to enter, but many invitations to. This was always the case for me when reading poems, but it’s finally starting to feel this way when I’m writing, too.

In the poem, “Blasphemy,” Martín Espada declares, “Let the blasphemy be spoken / poetry can save us”. I write because, on the page, I can practice honesty, bravery, tenderness, hope — the things that, honestly, have been saving my life every day for the past six months or so. 

SHANNAN

You ask some bold questions through your poems. “Am I the asshole,” the speaker asks, “for hating straight women / who wish that they were gay?” Later, in the same poem, you write about “the pendulum of…desire.” Lust is evoked as “honey,” as something intensely sweet to be devoured but then also connected to the “sun,” cosmological, transcendental. Want morphs into need, particularly in the final lines of “Meditations in an Emergency” when you circle back to “straight women” and create a demarcation between passive and active desire. I read both unabashed queer rage and kindness in these lines. Aligning with this poem in many ways is “Mess,” where the questions are not centered around challenging another but rather around challenging oneself in a playful, even sexy way. Sex in “Mess” goes beyond a political act and emerges as a foundational aspect of being, living. The body metamorphoses as food, heightening the sexuality, the lust. And yet, there are moments where the poem reveals “that mirror of my filth.” The ending is a very simple yet profound declaration of desire, of wanting “to know what’s next.” I’d love to know, in whatever way you feel comfortable, more on how you handle and enter into the queer woman’s experience through two externally different lenses here. And especially how they two – the political and the personal – mirror each other in your poetry (perhaps because as queer poets we may not feel the luxury of standing independent of either).

MICAELA

I wrote “Meditations in an Emergency” in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022 — hence the date in the epigraph. I would argue that the piece challenges me just as much as it challenges its designated other (i.e., straight women). That asshole question was not rhetorical! It’s one I’ve been asking myself a lot. When Roe v. Wade was overturned, I felt very privileged to be bisexual and in a same-sex partnership — I got to have as much sex as I wanted without the fear of a non-consensual pregnancy. In this way, I feel like my queerness safeguarded my pleasure and autonomy, and I wanted to be as honest about that as I was about my resentment towards the straight women who were talking about converting to lesbianism or whatever. Which is to say, I think it’s cheap to challenge others if you’re not also challenging yourself.

In “Mess,” I try to orient to queer womanhood through the lenses of play, permission, and possibility. Play through all the flirting in the opening stanzas, and permission through the speaker’s simultaneous longing and struggle to orient to desire the way her partner does — “to live with hunger / like it’s meant to happen.” The last lines of the poem — about wanting to know what’s next — feel the loudest, to me, in terms of possibility, but I do hope that it pulses throughout. 

A notable difference between “Meditations” and “Mess” is the level of intimacy between the speaker of each poem and who they’re addressing. The suspicion with which the speaker addresses straight women in “Meditations,” for example, is in stark contrast with the affection that the speaker in “Mess” has for her partner. But it would be too easy to categorize “Meditations” as the political poem and “Mess” as the personal one. Our “personal” decisions and attitudes — like who we fuck and how we feel about it — are actually always informed by the political climates of the places we live in. Legislation rewards some ways of moving through the world over others — just think about the tax benefits of marriage, which is often an instrument of monogamy and the nuclear family. In this way, the political often motivates the personal. Queerness, for me, is about identifying how the nation-state is trying to entice me to live my life, and learning to choose differently when those pathways don't align with my desires and values.

SHANNAN

I love how you employ absurdist and folkloric elements throughout your poems. There is the “fairytale tower [of unwashed dishes] in the sink,” hearing serotonin that “sounds like my mother”; in “Natur Mort,” night embodies personhood, dragging its “gown…across the sky,” hourglasses hold “loneliness,” an “ice-queen rises” and “an artist gambles his teeth.” The ending, wherein, “silence [is] velvet-smooth” harkens back to the night’s gown. In “Common Remedies,” the self is framed first as “dandelion” and then “ashes,” and here the folkloric and almost fantastical imagery takes on a sense of eco-anxiety. You write “something is always being broken” as opposed to “something is always broken.” There is a continuation here, ongoing destruction, and an odd kind of comfort in that. The absurdism of the poems never goes beyond a certain point of reality, always linking us back to what’s at stake, whether that’s queer experience or ecological crisis, or the body as it is celebrated and in turn ravaged through both. I think you end up creating a unique kind of fantasy/stark reality poetic genre. How does your connection to folklore influence this and from where does it arise? 

MICAELA

Not to typecast myself, but I am Latina, and magical realism runs in my blood. 

When I was a kid, I would come up with wild explanations for why things were happening. I was convinced, for a while, that fairies were stealing my toys. I believed that my shoelaces, which never tied the way I wanted them to, were conspiring against me. I told myself these stories whenever my circumstances felt unacceptable. Unsurvivable. 

These outlandish stories built up my reverence for, and belief in, what I couldn’t see. (So did Catholicism.) And while I now have many cognitive distortions and maladaptive tendencies to unlearn, I also have an expansive understanding of what is possible. In my poems, I think I live at the edge of honesty. I don’t ever lie per se in my poems — I just propose that there might be more to something than what meets the eye. I guess I tell stories about myself and about the world that can’t necessarily be proven. We don’t always need evidence to believe in something, anyway, which I think is simultaneously beautiful and scary. 

I also find it interesting that there might be comfort in the “Common Remedies” line, Something is always being broken. Honestly, I think it’s really devastating to be attuned to the ways in which we are hurting ourselves, each other, and the land in real time. But if we can identify when it’s happening, I suppose we have the opportunity to shift. 

SHANNAN

I’ve observed this before but I’d love to explore it a little bit more here. You like to “return” in your poems, as though you are mapping circles with the narrative. In “Setback,” you directly link the self and the earth, exploring what it is “to be of the earth...headed nowhere except in circles.” While it also connects to the aforementioned eco-anxiety for the future, I also see here a desire for restoration of the past, a sense of nostalgia for things forever lost, and even the self, forever transformed. In “Common Remedies,” the future is out of reach and time is stagnant. The speaker shifts through liminality of both the body and the mind. In the end, the speaker “listens” for their own cries “in the distance.” Space shrinks and at once elongates, both losing meaning and taking on profundity because it is the self separated from the self. In “Ode to Friendship,” you define “returning” as akin to “reading aloud lines / of a draft, for hints of where it might go next.” The poet refers to the poem while writing and revising the poem, wondering “if our past could tell the future.” Do you envision poetry as a channel for excavating and understanding the past, and then, perhaps also for “fixing” it? 

MICAELA

I don’t know that I have much nostalgia for the past — not in my conscious mind, at least. But I do see what you mean about the spiral-like nature of my work. I love coming full circle and hate leaving loose ends! Maybe this move in my poems is akin to resolving chord progressions in music. And, as the daughter of Venezuelan immigrants, I think I make “returns” in my work to compensate for not being able to go back to the land that both sides of my family called home for so many generations. I haven’t been to Caracas in over a decade, due to passport, safety, and financial barriers, but I am trying to go back in 2025. I think that’ll be a really interesting chapter for my writing.

Poetry gives me the space to experiment with new perspectives. Changing how I remember the past feels like a way in which I can change the past itself. A lot of it goes over my head, but I’m obsessed with the work of feminist physicist Karen Barad, who argues that the past — much like the future — is, on a quantum level, always being reworked. The idea moves me because, after all, my first touchpoint with my own history is memory, which is indeed fluid. If my understanding of the past shifts, then maybe its impact on me will shift, too. 

In my survivorhood, I’ve been trying to process and forgive myself for the ways in which I behaved while I was being subjected to violence. I’m learning to be honest — without victim-blaming — about the ways in which I abandoned myself. I’m asking, Who would I have become if I had had the skills to be brave?, and moving through a lot of grief. This doesn’t “fix” what happened, but it does help me carry it. 

SHANNAN

Mental health crops up as an essential theme throughout many of these poems but most starkly in “Lexapro,” wherein suicide is externally seen through a mundane lens, but when you get closer to the images of “updating my resume or cleaning my bathroom floor,” you notice that the distance is intentional. Moreover, both these activities are centered around hope and progress. Or at least the desire for there to be hope and progress. To update the resume means that you have amassed experience you want to express, to show the world that you have ambition. To clean the bathroom evokes dealing with the often shitty way depression can treat you. The rhythm of the poem also evokes a lullaby, especially towards the end. This is similar to “Sunset: Sonnet” in its childlike play of words, how the language is ambiguous, and remains at a distance from classifying personal experience into binaries of good or bad, destructive or productive. A “fruitless wish” exists to try and fail and try again. Though there is an unreachable horizon, still the speaker is able to “admire the length…left to walk”  In “Vow,” life itself becomes the vow to which the speaker proclaims “I do / I do”. Similarly, “Courage” talks about the “aftermath of circumstance,” questioning (but also unabashedly taking comfort in) who picks up our pieces when we shatter and why. Would you speak about the intersection of poetry and mental illness/health? How do you approach healing and caregiving? Is poetry part of it in any way? 

MICAELA

“Lexapro” is the goth older sister to all of the other poems in this feature. I wrote it in 2020, a few months after starting psychiatric meds, when I was still very afraid to hope, even on the page. So, it’s interesting that you shine such an optimistic light on the resume-writing and bathroom-cleaning. I really dread those kinds of tasks, even as I know that they’ll get done eventually. Suicide, for most of my life, had that air of inevitability, too. 

Thankfully, it’s really shifted in the last six months, and poetry’s played a huge role in that. Jericho Brown, in his essay, “To Be Asked For a Kiss,” cites Anne Sexton, who wrote, before ending her own life, that “suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.” The idea of suicide being fundamentally at odds with the way in which I make sense of the world — a threat to poetry, even — is transforming how I orient to my own ideation. For so long, I thought I was my death drive. Now, I identify a lot less with it, which allows me to work through it. Maybe I’m even slowly — slowly — letting go of it?

Writing often feels very healing for me. To be clear, however, I don’t mean that writing necessarily makes me feel better. It’s like what my somatics teacher, Hannah Harris-Sutro, says about centering — we don’t center to feel better, but to feel more. Poetry does that for me, too. It expands my capacity to be present with my entire experience. It pushes me towards wholeness. 

When it comes to caregiving I’m like many other femmes, in that I have a lot of wounds. I’ve been routinely pressured and expected to perform emotional labor for others, which makes being authentic very hard. In addition to curiosity, care, and solidarity, I’m trying to approach caregiving from a place of agency. I’m learning that I don’t have to abandon myself to show up for others. And, as I’ve mentioned, I’m trying to forgive myself for all the times that I’ve done just that. 

I’m really loving the idea of the page as a practice space. Poetry is one of the containers in which I embody the courage (“Courage”!), honesty, and compassion that I haven’t yet integrated into my daily life. It’s like an onboarding ramp. Healing, to quote “Sunset: Sonnet,” very much feels like a horizon I cannot reach — an asymptote of sorts. But I think I’m finally moving in the right direction, and that’s enough for me. 

SHANNAN

Thank you so much, Micaela! Finally, we would love to know poets who have influenced you most.

MICAELA

I think I’m more influenced by poems than I am by poets, so below are some pieces that have served as important teachers for me. A playlist, if you will.

(I’d also like to say that these responses were informed by conversations with my North star, xochi quetzali cartland. You can find their work in Muzzle later this spring.)