KARAN

Oh dear xochi, I love these poems so much! Your imagination appeals to me so incredibly.

This town & I are the same: 

we both want to be more than a place people pass through. 

So I take our pocket-sized city to the post office, sure 

I could ship all of Providence to you for 68 cents.

Do you have a writing routine, xochi? Your skillset at display here is so mind-blowing it’s hard to imagine that you’re not completely devoted to your craft. How do you begin, write, and finish a poem? Where do your poems come from?

xochi

Thank you so much for your kindness, Karan, & for this question. The easiest answer is that my poems come, largely, from a lot of research, although that sounds much more formal than what my actual process is. In reality I’m just a little rat that runs around picking up pieces of conversations, wikipedia articles, news stories, anything that feels interesting or lush. I have a running document called “scrap” where I store all these pieces (which is a trick I learned from microfiction writer Michael H. Stewart). Sometimes they then go on to become lines or poems (like the line you pulled, which is inspired by a Gilmore Girls quote), but more often they help me build the world where the poem will go on to live. 

I very much believe that poems are alive. Worldbuilding is a common concept in fiction, but I’ve found worldbuilding to consume a lot of my thinking as a poet. Each of my poems have their own ecologies of language, their own references, their own desires & agency. For example, “A Tragedy in Three Acts” describes a violent relationship through the scene of a bullfight, because I think both love & violence are spectator sports, & bullfighting is a world that can hold those complexities. 

Once I understand the world my poems exist in, & I have this collection of scrap language, I honestly just vibe in that space & eventually something happens. I really like what Shannon Hale says about drafting; “when writing a first draft, I have to remind myself constantly that I'm only shoveling sand into a box so later I can build castles.” I am a big believer in shitty first drafts. My first drafts tend to get the entire concept, but almost every line ends up getting replaced with more interesting language & better sonics. Giving myself permission to be a terrible poet ends up helping me get somewhere better, faster, because I am able to experiment without judgment & find what it is the poem wants to be.

KARAN

The first poem here, “Self Portrait as Harley Quinn,” grabbed me by the throat. I love persona poems, but to encounter one done so well is such a rare delight. I love how the speaker crafts a personal mythology, drawing parallels between her identity and Harley Quinn. The poem speaks to transformation and self-realization, most evident in the lines: “Yes, I am my own myth” and the transformation from being part of a destructive relationship to finding self-worth and identity outside of it. “Bear Hugs & Axolotl Dreams” also explores personal transformation through the lens of childhood and imagination, discussing the creation of a personalized stuffed animal that symbolizes a deeper part of the self. Is poetry an act of transformation for you? I guess I’m still asking a process question but hoping to go deeper: why do you write? 

xochi

There are two quotes that I hold close to my heart that deeply inform my orientation to my work. One comes from the Mexican feminist & anti-femicide movement (& many other Latin American social movements), which is “they took so much from us that they took away our fear.” There have been many times in my life where I traveled the bell curve of fear & found that I still had poetry. It lived inside my body & the world. And if I still had poetry, not everything was lost.

The other quote I think of often is Mariame Kaba's “hope is a discipline.” Every good thing in my life began with hope. I repaired my relationship with my parents with the hope that we could be more than the intergenerational trauma we carried. I left the relationships that didn't serve me with the hope that life could be better than what I knew. Hope was there even when love wasn't, it made courage possible. And hope, for me, starts in a poem, it starts with the quiet voice asking “don’t you want to be brave?” 

KARAN

You told me that “We Melted, We Welded, We Forged” was written in response to “Ode to Friendship” by Micaela Camacho-Tenreiro, which we had the pleasure of publishing earlier this year. Micaela, in her poem writes:

Sure, we collided in Spanish /

class, two Latinas with American

shame, but it is not gravity

that holds us together.

And then you, xochi, tell the story of your meeting this way:

That day, when you challenged 

the sun to a bar fight & lost, when you swallowed the darts 

of your own despair, when I found you

I love how you both navigate the emotional landscape of belonging and abandonment, and have captured the pain of loss and the residual hope in connections that define one's sense of place. How do you feel about these poems living in the same home? What is a common thread between friendship and writing? Both of you also embody an uncommon spirit of generosity that is so hard to find. How important is expressing love and friendship in the sad cruel world we live in?

xochi

I would like to start by saying that Micaela’s work is incredible. I am sure many people feel that about their best friend’s art, but in my case it happens to also be true. So I would highly recommend anyone reading to check out Micaela’s ONLY POEMS publication & interview, if they have not already. 

I also think some important context is necessary, not to enjoy these pieces but to understand the story they tell. I found Micaela before I had the courage to call myself a poet; we met on the first day of undergrad when we were both 18. For four years, we had the kind of rocky dynamic that I think is common in homoerotic sapphic friendships. We were more than friends, but less than lovers. We took our trauma out on each other. We didn’t know how to communicate what we needed & so would ghost each other instead of leaning into the risk of relationship. Finally, we were at a crossroads where we could either never speak again, or we could make the choice to rise rather than fall in love. We chose each other over our fear.

“Ode to Friendship” really does document that journey extraordinarily well, & my favorite part about that piece is that Micaela wrote it while we were in the middle of a fight, & gave it to me as a promise that we’d keep working through our issues together. The next time we were fighting, I wrote “We Melted, We Welded, We Forged,” & that started the ritual of us gifting each other love poems during the hardest parts of our relationship. Our poems have become the way we wave the white flag of surrender, & reassure each other that we are more than our worst moments. I am so deeply grateful that they get to live in the same home.

So many of the references in these pieces are true & heavily feature Providence, the city where we met & fell in love. Our language echoes each other; the “cafe-bookstore-bar” Micaela writes about is Riffraff, which was one of our favorite places to haunt while we lived in Rhode Island. The 1800s mall we fought in is the Arcade, which lives on Westminster Street, where my piece is set. These poems are deeply in conversation with one another, because they are ultimately documenting how much we have grown in & through our friendship. And in many ways, as our relationship healed, our writing got stronger, because of how we held & helped each other.

Micaela is the first person I call to read my shitty first drafts, the last person to read a piece before I send it for publication. Sharing our work is a form of intimacy & an even deeper practice of trust; I trust that when they say I can do better they mean it. Micaela is also a fantastic dancer (of both salsa & ballet), & the precision that dance demands also bleeds into their writing.  I call them my poem orthodontist because they have a tendency to go into my pieces & tighten all the language up. With them, no word is ever wasted.

I think, at its core, writing & friendship are both forms of knowledge. They are both lenses with which we can see the world. My friendship with Micaela is, to me, proof that goodness exists in the world, & I carry that truth with me everywhere I go. It is what helps me not give in to nihilism, which has been harder these days, especially amidst the brutality happening in Palestine, Venezuela, Sudan, & all other colonial projects. I hope deeply that everyone gets to experience a friendship like ours, one that makes life more possible, at some point in their lives. 

KARAN

When we first encountered “Ode to the Hoarders,” Shannan was visibly moved, laughing and throwing fists in the air, exclaiming how fantastic the poem is. I share her enthusiasm, particularly for the way the poem delves into the psyche of collecting and preserving. It uses hoarding as a metaphor for memory and value, suggesting a deep introspective look at what we hold onto and why. “& you look for God in every / Thing.” The act of hoarding is often used as a lens to explore human desires to preserve memories and the inherent value we assign to objects. This reflects deeply on our relationships with the past and with each other, highlighting how our collections can symbolize our ties to history and personal connections. I don’t really have a question but love how such a short poem is doing so much work. Would you like to say anything about this poem in particular? Trace its origin for us?

xochi

This poem came out of a Brooklyn Poets workshop I took this past spring with I.S. Jones (whose own work is incredible & I would highly recommend reading)! The prompt Itiola assigned us was to write an ode to something shameful. I picked hoarding largely because that was something I felt (& still sometimes feel) a lot of shame about. The length came largely from my desire for the content of the poem (excess) to contrast with the form (brevity).

In my early 20s, I was in a very violent relationship. My partner would destroy things that held deep value to me — letters from loved ones, family heirlooms, favorite clothing, even wiping my hard drive & deleting my poems. After this relationship, it became very hard for me to distinguish what was valuable & what was worth letting go of. I think this is a very normal & intelligent adaptation to the harm that happened to me, but it doesn’t change the shame I feel. I grew up in a household that abhors clutter & sees messiness as a personal defect.

In this piece, I had the chance to choose a kinder orientation. Choosing to see collecting as a form of archiving — a process where I respect my need to hold on in order to cope with loss — felt like the kindest orientation I could give. And, has actually helped me let go of that behavior, since I am no longer trying to bully myself out of it.

For me, poems are practice spaces. I get to practice having compassion for myself even when it is hard. I get to practice moving lovingly even if it feels impossible to access. I get to practice the person, daughter, & community member I want to be, & the world I want to live in.

KARAN

I love how seamlessly the personal seeps into the political in your poems. “Real Magic” uses the narrative of familial history and the legacy of land and loss to discuss the intimate and often painful connections between personal history and wider historical events. What are your thoughts on political poetry? Is all poetry political?

xochi

I think all poetry deals with personhood. And by personhood, I mean what it means to be a body that has a spirit (which is a definition rïn serai & I came up with, in our abolitionist work together). This definition is not isolated to humans. I think Layli Long Soldier, for instance, writes beautifully about the personhood of grasses, & Natalie Diaz writes beautifully about the personhood of rivers. We also live in a time when all personhood is treated as political, because we live under structures that systematically deny personhood to anyone who is not white, wealthy, & able-bodied/minded.

For me, the colonial violence that has happened to my family is not separate from the interpersonal violence that we’ve enacted & endured. “Real Magic” as a piece largely came out of my fear for my family in Mexico City, which is currently experiencing a horrific water crisis. The title is a reference to the Coca-Cola slogan, since it is widely said in Mexico that “no es sequía, es sequeo,” or “it’s not drought, it’s plunder.” Coca-Cola is one of many companies that have contributed to the water crisis, a crisis that truly started during Spanish colonization, when the five lakes that surrounded Tenochtitlan were drained. That history is a part of my family history. That violence is not separate.

“The Myth of the Five Suns” similarly attempts to interrogate the intersections between personal & political violence. It is inspired by the Mexica creation myth, which holds that this world is our fifth sun. Each section represents a story in my family that I have inherited. When I was a kid, these stories were always shared in hushed tones; the sexual violence my great-grandmother suffered, the Tlatelolco massacre my grandfather witnessed, the migration & systemic poverty my mother survived. As an adult, it has been healing for me to document those legacies, & to bear witness to that pain. Where we come from, what has happened to us, that is so much of who we are.

KARAN

You do not shy away from pop-culture references — Harley Quinn, the Joker, Build-A-Bear, Morton Salt Girl, Meryl Streep — these make the poems more accessible. They are also where a lot of the humor is introduced in the poems, as in Denise Duhamel’s poetry. These pop-cultural references contribute to the richness of your poems by anchoring them in specific times, cultural contexts, and shared experiences. They also serve as bridges between the personal and the collective, inviting readers to relate to the speaker’s reflections through familiar cultural touchpoints. How do you approach incorporating pop-cultural references into your poetic craft? Are these references a deliberate choice to enhance accessibility, create layers of meaning, or establish a specific tone within your work? Could you share insights into your process of selecting and weaving these references into your poems?

xochi

All of these pieces, with the exception of “Bear Hugs & Axolotl Dreams,” were written in 2024. And largely, all the references just capture whatever obsession I had at the time. I love Harley Quinn — I was rewatching the show when I wrote that piece. In many ways, I see myself reflected in her journey to leave the Joker & become someone she can be proud of. “Bear Hugs & Axolotl Dreams” I wrote in 2023, right before my 24th birthday. Build-A-Bear has a policy where on your birthday the cost of your bear is the same as your age, & so I used to go for my birthdays as a kid. I was thinking about that memory, & decided that this was the year I was going to fall back in love with being alive, hence the poem. The choice to include these references isn’t a deliberate one to increase the accessibility of my work, but I do think about how they might increase (or in some cases, reduce) accessibility.

For instance, included in this portfolio is “No sé qué tienen las flores, Llorona.” The piece features La Llorona, a popular figure in a Mexican folktale parents use to scare their children into obedience. The story goes that La Llorona drowned her children & will come & drown you if you misbehave. I think a lot about how she is a woman denied the privilege of context — in early stories, it was said that she drowned her children because she was being abused, but there have been other variations — that she was jealous, that she was spiteful. I have long since been obsessed with La Llorona because in her I see all women who are villainized, as if the first violence was the one they caused, not the one that happened to them. This reference is inherently inaccessible for people who don’t know the story, & I purposefully don’t offer a translation for the title. I think part of resisting white supremacy also involves resisting the pressure to write for the benefit of a white audience, & so I choose references that matter to me, & release my need to control whether or not people understand them. 

KARAN

I love that you don’t offer translations in your poems and also don’t italicise “foreign” words. I hate this industry push. How the fuck can the poet’s language be foreign to them. I always make the same decolonizing argument but find that people feel pushed by the market to provide translations, italicise native words, etc. Hopefully that will change soon.

This next question has become a staple for us and I’m always delighted by the variation in the answers. So, there’s a school of poetry that believes a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. I can, of course, see all these elements in your poems, as one would expect in any good poet. But I’d love to know where you feel you're writing from. And do you see yourself moving elsewhere?

xochi

I had a really good friend in college who used to say that all artists have a crush on another artistic discipline. They were a painter but loved animation & illustration. I’m a poet who crushes on all the performance arts: dance, music, theater. And I’m begrudgingly a poet of the soul. My poems always seem to come from the most central part of my spirit, against my desires & better judgment. But I have a crush on all art made with the heart, & all the artists who make it. I don’t know if my work will ever come from that place but I’m excited to try.

KARAN

I’m excited to follow you on your journey., xochi. What is some of the best writerly advice you’ve received so far, whether it be during your school, or outside of institutionalized education that you’d like to share with other young writers? Something a mentor said to you that stuck with you?

xochi

Las palabras, como las semillas, tienden a multiplicarse cuando las alimentamos y las ponemos a la luz. Words, like seeds, tend to multiply when we feed them & give them light. Luis Miguel Estrada Orozco taught the only creative writing class I took in Spanish, & this always stuck with me. He meant that we needed to give them time, but our words would grow. And that not every seed would sprout but if you kept planting them, if you kept caring for them, you were bound to get life at some point or another. Micaela now says it to me constantly when I am stuck on a poem. I am chronically impatient. As a poet who tends to write quickly & dislikes having unfinished pieces, I really struggle with the waiting part of writing. But las palabras son semillas reminds me that no writing is ever wasted. Even the pieces that won’t ever grow up to be poems, they will become fertile compost from which other language is born. 

KARAN

God, I love that, xochi! Thank you. I’d like you to recommend a piece (anything other than a poem) — a song, a classical composer/composition, a painting, a nonfiction essay, a book of short stories, anything that speaks to you so much that, if you could, you’d impose it on everyone.

xochi

Hands down I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson. Someone very important to me gave it to me in high school & I have read it yearly since. It is a pocketful of grace in the form of a book. And, one of my favorite quotes from it is “we wish with our hands. that’s what we do as artists.” 

We wish with our hands. My god, doesn’t that just make you want to live another day? 

KARAN

Recently, we decided to ask our poets for a poetry prompt at the end. Would you provide a prompt for our readers, to help kickstart a poem?

xochi

I am a big believer in play, & believe that the best things happen when we give ourselves permission to play. So I’d like to encourage all poets & poetry lovers to ask one of their beloveds to go on a playdate with them. Bonus points if, on your playdate, you re-engage with an activity you were shamed out of loving. You might be surprised what poems come out of that leap. 

KARAN

Finally, xochi, we’d love to know poets who have influenced you most.

xochi

First & foremost, my teachers, I.S. Jones, Sawako Nakayasu, Niko Lazetic, & Michael H. Stewart have been the most influential poets & writers in my life. Sawako, Niko, & Michael were three professors I had in undergrad, who supported my work even as I went through that dreaded phase where my writing was just legitimately not skillful & kind of painful to read. I am still a poet today because of their kindness. Itiola I owe endless thanks to, not just for giving the prompt that inspired “Ode to the Hoarders,” but for pushing me to write “Self Portrait as Harley Quinn” even though I was afraid.

Other poets who have entirely influence my work include Eduardo C. Corral, whose poem “Our Completion” encouraged me to start unapologetically incorporating Mexican folklore & Spanish into my pieces; Chen Chen, who reminds me that poetry should also play; JJ Peña, who has written some of the most beautiful prose poems I have ever read & expands my definition of what poetry can be; Hanif Abdurraqib, who I genuinely believe is a once in a generation voice & holds a brilliance that is both so accessible & so craftful; Steven Espada Dawson, whose writing about familial addiction has deepened my ability to tell a compassionate truth; & Natalie Diaz, who I think is just one of the best to ever do it. 

Lastly, of course, I am always inspired by Micaela Camacho-Tenreiro, my poem orthodontist who generously edited these responses, saving all readers from some very bad jokes & even worse run-on sentences.