Rose Zinnia, writer and designer, featured in the Ocean State Review
Photo by Anna Powell Denton
Laster (Nonbinary)
another Now distends & I’ve become Sheeva from Mortal Kombat
eight-packed & multi-limbed flexing a trying-to-last countenance
some have said: I’m a stone-faced wraith made placate with sate:
if rock can be said to be soulless is another body all together
now: I don’t know about you but I’ve seen some emotional bone-
homes
in this bizarre death match called Life: beheaded black locusts
coppicing new limbs in the plant archipelagos of deserted K-mart
parking lots declared dead the roots still twitch: a hidden river
flows through the service industry worker’s hair: we collapse into
time
lessnesses to return more placid like mom popping a shirt over
yr too-large head I’ve been running away twice morning and night
to evict a karmic malaise: where does what we shed end: do I exist
for the personal delectation of my fellow game players: wrest me
from the mixed reception to the performance of my character:
: O Laster :
where have you been I know: I’m a mawkish breed of mare
my phone told me so: it would no longer store my intentions:
so I scoured the former Earth attempting to conjure
its mere threads: Loss absconds with our incessant shuffling
of meaning & wish: trite regurgitation of poisonous pith
I don’t want to admit it but I’ll be glad one day I bet
(a gaunt ghost of sentiment) for all this to end
to forget what I’d wished ought not to’ve ever been
I first encountered Rose Zinnia’s poetry by way of their luminous chapbook, Abracadabrachrysanthemum (2018), (one of my all-time favorite titles!). Zinnia’s poetry is stunning, featuring associative leaps alongside singular images, shifts in time, narrative, identities, and an overall focus on describing the contradictory feelings and thoughts of any given moment. In “Abracadabra,” the speaker muses on the word chert: “ad infinitum & vice versa i close / my eyes & say chert 11 times fast // a spell or prayer it becomes church / sometimes curd other times hurt shirt” eventually leading to “kurt”
who i worked at burger king with
who drank slushies with vodka in them
every shift one time slathered
two inches of mayo on the mayor’s
bacon king to kill him faster he said
when i asked why he did that
one time bought a case of king cobra forties
& hid them in the pop cup back stock
drank them warm one time fucked
the lard smoked the freezer out told me i was
innocent & pure while exiting the building
to smoke weed with the other employees
winked at me after saying it
This short excerpt illustrates Zinnia’s verbal dexterity and attention to language, the minutiae of momentary existence, and the ephemerality of being. These characteristics are further exemplified in “Laster (Nonbinary),” their magical poem featured in the 2019 Ocean State Review. I had the great fortune and pleasure of talking with Rose Zinnia about this poem, their poetic practice, and the world.
Charles Kell: I have read “Laster (Nonbinary)” over and again, and upon each subsequent reading a different line, word, image captures me. A cursory search of “Laster” reveals one definition to be a “workman whose business it is to shape boots or shoes, or place leather smoothly on lasts (a mechanical form shaped like a human foot, used by shoemakers and cordwainers in the manufacture and repair of shoes. Lasts typically come in pairs and have been made from various materials, including hardwoods, cast iron, and high-density plastics); another definition notes that it can be “someone or something that lasts for a notably long time.” Also, a little way past the mid-point of your poem there is the call: “O Laster:” where it can be read as the proper name of an individual. Non-binary is not relating to, or composed, or involving just two things; also, it denotes toward a gender or identity that is not defined in terms of binary oppositions. For me, non-binary connotes a fluidity at work, while at the same time a disjunction (this seems antithetical, I know); also, proliferating ideas, identities, thought processes come to mind; a person “containing multitudes.” This poem contains multitudes. Before we jump into the poem proper, I wonder and want to ask about the work the title is performing, and I want to ask about “work” in the poem. How are these two things related and how do they play off one another?
Rose Zinnia: Hi, and thank you, Charles! Laster was a term that my friend, the superb poet and writer janan alexandra, and I made up together. I didn’t realize it was a word, but I assume any sound is a word, ie. it can complete the function of a word, or: every word is a sound. Which you have just confirmed. The story of how the poem came to be goes like this: I posted a story on my Instagram of the last aster (you can see where this is going already…) in my garden a year or two ago—it must’ve been in early November or so—I was amazed the flower had lasted so long into the cold season. I think she replied LASTER, to my story and I replied to her: we should both write a poem for each other called Laster, or maybe it was the other way around, but anyway, voilà!: portmanteau magic. So we wrote these poems and presented them to each other (one of my favorite things is to write poems for my loves); it was really beautiful and tender. Later, I edited this poem for janan into the poem that appears here and decided hey maybe I’ll send it out to places.
As the poem developed, I realized the multivalence of the word laster and was excited about that. The poem starts with my initial association with it, Mortal Kombat, which was a video game I played a lot of (shoutout Sega Genesis) growing up, and a movie, where the objective of the game was to outlast everyone by killing them off in one-on-one fights. From there, I kind of just associated: Mortal Kombat felt like what living in a capitalistic white supremacist cishetero colonial world feels like, always fighting against each other to have the most or be the “best” (um, what?) My distinct alienation felt like their alienation and theirs and theirs and a part of this larger alienation and so on and so on. And I came to wonder what it might be like to imagine a different world. And I thought about how even when something appears to be dead (or more accurately, killed), it often is not. The roots of certain trees can remain alive indefinitely despite being stumped by latching on to fellow trees’ roots and exchanging nutrients underground. Anyway, all these associations and connections came to me—which is maybe, for me, a poem’s most treasured magic—they connect everything that has been riven apart by the forces of lack and fear. I feel like we’re all supposed to be connected like those underground roots (and I believe we are, spiritually, what with the etiology of the universe) and we’re getting back there, to that trust, and love, and understanding, and that’s the work, of poems, and everything otherwise. Work is seeing the portal of a word/world like laster, or the hair of a stranger caught in capital’s throng, and diving into it, trusting the leap. It’s reaching across those voids. It’s jumping into what looks like concrete and being caught by water. It’s not binarizing and settling the Earth and thereby defining it into submission, but rather letting it open freely as it needs into what J. Kameron Carter calls the “sheerly possible,” into the effortless change and togetherness that is being, which is for me a kind of ante-ontology, or indigeneity, to quote Billy-Ray Belcourt. He also posits, in his poem “Red Utopia,” that queerness is a kind of anti-subjectivity, which I would connect to being which is not being a single being, to paraphrase Moten. Blackness and queerness and indigeneity reveal for/to/with us the multiplicity of being which the settler has tried to obliterate for centuries. Belcourt also says this, which is what I think elucidates what work is: Maybe justice is a lover who regurgitates the English language / so it comes back sweeter. Like this line, my poems feel self-consciously discontent with the illusion of justice, with signifiers that smirk at work, but don’t actually do work. Yes, we should use English to do beautiful things, to take it back from those who used it for oppression, to, in a way, mutate it away from the colonizer language—but that is not the end: it is but reform. Justice is the absolute collective abolition of the colonial world and its assets, wills, affects, effects, and our subsequent leap back / reconciliation of the (post?)-human with Earth, a kind of return to indigeneity and queerness and Blackness as guiding n/ontologies.
As for the (Nonbinary) part: I am loosely writing in / continually conceiving this non/form which I named the nonbinary, which on a basic level suggest to the reader a way to read, see, feel. For me, the Earth (we) is (are) queer and nonbinary. Cisheteronormative binaristic ontologies are but paper towns in which we got stuck filming the same trite movie over and over again. Mahmoud Darwish (translated by John Berger): I come from one meaning and go to another / Life is liquid / and I thicken it and define it / with my pair of scales and sceptre. I feel like the phenomenological cognitive structures we have at our disposable with regards to gender specifically, but also actually for most everything, are imaginatively bleak. We need more room, more capaciousness, in our conception of possible. We’re beating our wings on the ceilings. We’re con-sealed by the State apparatuses we’re caught in, which, include the imagination.
CK: What I love about the poem’s opening is how it thrusts the reader into the middle of the action; there is an attention to time that is conveyed through the first two words—“another Now”—that illustrates both the medias res, that this is a repetition; however, the fact that “Now” is capitalized draws importance to this moment, this second. And it is “Now” that the speaker becomes “Sheeva from Mortal Kombat / eight-packed & multi-limbed flexing a trying-to-last countenance”; here, Sheeva appears equally poised to fight, to engage in combat, while also maintaining a position of holding on, a “trying-to-last”; but this position is also more than either/or; it occupies other, separate realms: can you, Rose, talk a little about the separate, other spaces the speaker is thrust into at the opening of the poem, and touch upon the precariousness of these spaces?
RZ: I have experienced disassociation/depersonalization (DP/DR) for almost my entire life. One of the things that sometimes happens when I have a depersonalized episode is I can’t remember who I am, or I am other people, so, for instance: I’m leaving my house and I suddenly have the inexplicable feeling that I am Sheeva from Mortal Kombat, or an alien or, the most common—just no one—no name, no century, no memories, no knowledge of myself or who I love or who loves me. These states are highly unpredictable, appearing randomly and lasting for anywhere from mere moments to days. In these warped states of worldlessness / consciouslessness, I somehow survived through the years. And I don’t mean I thought I was someone else or no one in these moments—I actually was. Eventually, I would come back into my “self” but even the idea of “self” feels slippery, creaky—as it would to you too, perhaps, if you constantly slipped into other selves. This experience, while extremely painful and confusing for much of my life, has given me insight into ante-subjectivity, and showed me how we are not just one being. The blessing is next to the wound. I hope in this poem that the reader can experience this disorientation in similar ways as an opening in the world, as a site of the currently unfathomable. These interstices are unstable, but they are w/hole.
CK: The first characteristic of the second couplet that knocks me over has to do with your supreme attention to the various sounds at work and play:
some have said: I’m a stone-faced wraith made placate with sate:
if rock can be said to be soulless is another body all together
In some ways, the repetitive “a” sounds add another layer of defense, a staccato tapping. It is almost a mantra of sorts, as well; a short, memorable phrase one can repeat in order to both steel one for fight and to also comfort. To be “stone-faced” is to attempt to hide emotion, feeling; wraith denotes a ghost or ghost-like image, perhaps one shortly before or after death; I am reminded of the notion of the “specter,” the idea of “hauntology” at work, where an individual or image hovers there, yet the origin can not be traced, that it simply is an always-already state. Similarly, the speaker is made “placate with sate:” that is, there is a forced, in a sense, lessening of anger, hostility, with the satisfaction of a desire, appetite. And back to sound: in many ways sound placates and sates, sometimes lulls, and also enables the reader to gloss, read quickly, stay on the surface with the play of the words, rather than close reading. Rose, can you talk a bit about the wonderful sounds in this couplet (and the poem) and sound in general in your poetic practice? How does sound inform meaning and vice versa? Are there particular sounds and/or poets you are drawn toward?
RZ: Yes! Hauntology is at work in my poems for sure (and in all the air we breathe). More specifically, I/we are hauntologically marked by the pheromones of colonialism and capitalism on this land. It embeds in us, libidinally and spectrally. And there’s a kind of exorcism in sound, I believe. A way of getting shit out of you. Call it spells or magic or music, what have you. Incantatory poetics summon spirit’s presence in the poem (and the life) and it goes into you and it pulls shit out. It also puts flowers and whale songs in your blood. I really like your idea that sound blocks close reading by almost forcing one to gloss the text, to skim it as water a stone—it’s a kind of protection, yes, over the portal that is the poem’s language. The portal is where we can get out of here. We’re opening portals all the time. You got to, to survive. You almost have to disassociate in this trashfire century (Sandra Simonds). And yet, still: the Earth has always been beautiful. Sound is play, it is holy, it is the connection of the corpse and the spirit, it is the zinnia rising out of dirt. Earth makes sound; humans play Earth. Earthplay is perhaps why we are alive. Earth likes to be played with. Which involves a kind of asking to play. Play is a kind of love. Do you remember asking your friends if they wanted to play when you were little? We need more of that, I think. Sound is meaning, then, is what I’m getting at. And Silence (following M. NourbeSe Philip) is sound, is vibratory. We’ve become so divorced from the connection between word and sound—the signifiers have shifted over time away from their signified, but we can still feel that trace of play, a kind of truth in sound. It’s a kind of shared acknowledgement of our being. My wolfdog is howling right now with the ambulance which is rushing a hurt person to the hospital. The wind is making the cedar trees go swishhhhhhhhhoooooo. It’s making my skin go foofohshshsh. The wind, the cedar trees, my body, the ambulance, all dancing, vibrating together. Do you feel it? It’s everywhere. I’m not drawn to any particular sounds or poets, but listening to a lot of hip hop growing up got me thinking deeply about how sound and language is linked inexorably. I’ve been a musician and songwriter and played in bands most of my adult life too so I feel like I have a tendency to be sound-focused in my poems. My ears/thinking are attuned for it and when I make meaning in my brain it’s also through sound (though probably the image most of all). It’s a way of getting things closer, of seeing again, of listening deeply to the Earth for that inherent togetherness of being.
CK: Into the third couplet I notice the repetitive use of the colon, also there is the first address to a “you”:
now: I don’t know about you but I’ve seen some emotional bone-
homes
in this bizarre death match called Life: beheaded black locusts
First, I am fascinated with the use of the colon throughout this poem. There is its use to announce, introduce, and/or direct attention to a list; it joins sentences or sets off quotes; it can also express time. Personally, I am obsessed with lists, images, bric-a-brac in texts and life. However, your use of the colon is doing more than simply marking time or drawing attention to lists. I see the deft use of the colon in this poem to be intricately wrapped up with the speaker’s shapeshifting, the speaker’s legerdemain with identity and being. The kaleidoscopic identity-shifts at work are wonderfully dizzying and dazzling. Can you touch upon the use of the colon, and how, in any way, it relates to the plurality of identities at work?
RZ: Yes! The colon is being used here intentionally as a kind of opening, a portal. I’ve been theorizing about the colon as portal for about a year or more since I started using it in my poems like this and after I was talking with my friend and amazing poet Rosie Stockton about destituent grammar and the paraontological un-space of the caesura, by way of Fred Moten. I first encountered the colon in a liberatory grammar c. 2016 in Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s poem “RR Lyrae: Matter.” I didn’t know then what it was doing but I think it gave me permission to think about punctuation in a fresh way. If “the world” is the way we arrange the material of the Earth, then I was caught in arranging words and letters and grammars in a hegemonic way. And all engaged in this world of normalization are unconsciously drawn to following its rules. We need to break them…we need to become unlimited…
As for my theorizing about the colon, I’d need to start with the period. The period is an endstop to a sentence, it signifies a stop sign, a pause, an endpoint. If you look more closely, it’s more like something like a rock: you trip over it, which causes you to stumble staccato. A comma is similar, but is more like a root or a flower (less violent than a period). A colon then is a period with a period over it, a kind of cancelling the period out, and thus making a gateway, an opening, a portal. It doesn’t stumble us like the period or comma, but it does shunt us through the gravity of its opening, transforming us in the process. It is a black w/hole (following M. NourbeSe Philip here), a portal wherein we are changed and the same, thus, as you pointed out, we are never just one being—we are fluid and flowing and multiple. On a basic level, it’s a way of keeping sentences connected without stopping the flow or connection. Whereas caesura is paraontological un-space, the colon points to all language’s connection—it is caesura, but it shows its path, it is a kind of map. And I would argue, the body in collaboration with Earth and Silence, is a kind of terra/listening, is a caesura: a trans/dimensional opening through to polyversic queerness.
CK: Jumping off proliferating notions of identities, the next two couplets showcase and draw attention to place and setting:
coppicing new limbs in the plant archipelagos of deserted K-mart
parking lots declared dead the roots still twitch: a hidden river
flows through the service industry worker’s hair: we collapse into
time
lessnesses to return more placid like mom popping a shirt over
I love the image and thought of deserted K-marts (my childhood was spent at endless K-marts in Ohio), and also the cracked parking lots with plant-life poking through, this mish-mash juxtaposition of human-made structure with greenery that is in the process of reclaiming space. Also, as I mention above with the address of “you,” here there is an attention drawn to “we.” More, there is an introduction to “a hidden river / flow[ing] through the service industry worker’s hair:”; I am captivated by the description of this individual as a “service industry worker,” not simply “worker,” but more; there is an attention to service, of the fact that others rely on this individual. Can you talk about the role of addressee, the incorporation of others in this poem, and also talk about the role that both “place” and “environment” play in these couplets, in the poem, and, maybe, in your work?
RZ: We need each other. We are each other. Following Ross Gay, Oh shit, I am definitely not a myself! When I see the river in the service industry worker’s hair, I am that river, I am that worker, and the worker is me and the river, too. We are in service of each other. It is hidden only by capital and coloniality’s lens. This world would appear abundant if we organized the way we see the Earth differently. Place for me is both specific and general. I feel very connected to certain places and others not, because I am an individual and I am not. And yet, I feel my home is the Earth, too. I am made of the Earth, literally. And I am made of elements that came to this Earth from outer space. So, we are terrestrial and extraterrestrial. I am here in service of the creation of the Earth, an ongoing, collaborative creation. Poems help us realize place, in its multivalent shimmering, and locate us, allow us, grant us, a sense of belonging and being-with. Without place, we live in whiteness, in placelessness, which is a kind of total obliteration of Earth. By reaching out to an addressee in a poem, you create this place, which is a kind of relation. Brené Brown recently said something like “Communication happens only in relation.” You have to have a relationship to communicate. In my we-ing, I am attempting to acknowledge both the idea that I am a multiplicitous “self” and that I am other people, too. The idea of we has been corroded by whiteness, which alienates and categorizes and polices collectivity. The healing of collectivity is something I think is going on right now. With all the alienation and splitting into hierarchies and taxonomies of bodies and identities, a sense of we is being impossiblized / pitted against itself by colonialism. A we can only be gotten to by reaching through and across différance, by acknowledging the realness of our idenity and relationality and yet insisting on connection despite, through, across, with, and into, love.
CK: I am struck by the devastating line breaks in the following couplets, and how each break focuses on the moment while thrusting the reader headlong into the next image.
yr too-large head I’ve been running away twice morning and night
to evict a karmic malaise: where does what we shed end: do I exist
for the personal delectation of my fellow game players: wrest me
from the mixed reception to the performance of my character:
Similarly to the proliferation of identities, images, interactions running throughout, there is a hyperawareness to the speaker’s movements: early, I get the impression of the speaker momentarily occupying a static physical space, despite the various forces, at this moment the speaker mentions that “I’ve been running away twice morning and night” in order “to evict a karmic malaise:”; here, there appears for the wish of the running, the movement to stop, and there is also the first two questions: “where does what we shed end: do I exist / for the personal delectation of my fellow game players:”; these are questions with no question marks. Therefore, they work as statements that the speaker possibly knows the answer to, yet is restating them to think through them on a different level, to mull over. I am struck again by the notions of identity. How the shapeshifting and shedding of skin can be pleasurable and, ultimately burdensome, how it can be simple and also extremely difficult work, how bodies experience ranges of pleasure yet are simultaneously sites of decay, rot, immense pain, and how it experiences the range of feelings in-between. Some words that come to mind: frustration, jouissance, disgust, ennui. I love the word choice, how the speaker muses on their “mixed reception to the performance of my character;”; my questions here, again, jump off from identity to encompass “character,” how does the creation of the poem—during its process—and the afterlife of the poem equally frustrate and support “character”? That is, both the “character” of the poet, and all of the “characters” in the poems? I am struck by these moments, and I am having a difficult time articulating, but I am endlessly fascinated with the four words “reception to the performance,” and maybe this can be an entry into the question?
RZ: Yes, the reception to the performance of the character. The performance one must do of a self varies in expectation depending on how you are in relation to power. In this world we live in, we must prove the worth of our existence, we must “make” money, we must follow colonial codes and gesticulations that continue to reproduce the relations of production (Althusser). I have been thinking lately (and forever) how this is unbelievably insane. That I must prove my worth to a system in order to survive. That people can own land and charge other people to live on it. (What the fuck?) That wealth is hoarded and it is totally expected and normalized for companies to exploit workers, ie. pay them an amount that barely allows them to survive. This is the world we live in, and it could just as well be otherwise. And yet it’s so normalized we forget this. And so back to character: we evaluate each other in order to see who gets access to power and resources. If you do not evaluate well, ie. you do not assimilate to the norm enough, sorry, no money, no living for you. This is nothing short of violence. And yet some of the most violenced people stay alive, despite. In spite. We are taking the Earth’s resources, and burning them up or storing them in vaults, and subjugating the majority to work for keys to that vault. And we act as if our existence alone has to be earned. Earn a living. Again, what? What if we thought every life that was here was already earned, and we showered each other with the abundance of Earth? What if we stopped calling from fear? I’m just like so tired of having to prove my own worth every day. I wake up and have to prove my worth. And I know a lot of other people are too. And capitalism and colonialism and white supremacy and alla that bull are set up like a video game we are forced to play from birth. I’m talking about unplugging the whole game console. We talking about getting us the hell out of these socialities and relationalities of violence. When I see you, I want to be able to see you. I’m not seeing your performance or how well you’re playing the game. I’m seeing how you notice and love and the way you walk the Earth. And that’s already perfect. I’m not here to evaluate, I’m here to acknowledge the brilliance already sprawling across our collective landscape. We don’t need to “get better”; we need to change what we focus on.
CK: The break in the poem is powerful: “: O Laster:” and it is at this moment, a pause of sorts, where the speaker, who was asking to be “wrest[ed]” earlier, makes this statement, and one can read this statement in many different ways: a cry, a call, a sigh, a questioning, a weariness, an insouciant tease. These different readings are all at work depending upon the way one reads the poem. If one reads it aloud, one has to give the statement a particular inflection; on the other hand, if one silently reads, one can simultaneously think and feel all of these inflections. This break specifically performs all of the shapeshifting that is articulated and elided throughout the poem. The following couplets both extend the questioning and statements and redirect the speaker toward different movements.
where have you been I know: I’m a mawkish breed of mare
my phone told me so: it would no longer store my intentions:
so I scoured the former Earth attempting to conjure
its mere threads: Loss absconds with our incessant shuffling
I read this moment as self-referential in that it is drawing attention to the poem’s “incessant shuffling,” and also the poem’s conjuring; however, the conjuring adds weight to the shuffling in that this shuffling is not simply a random practice. Also, “intentions” are gone, they can “no longer” be stored. Rose, can you look at, or speak to how this poem works, or is trying to work as a “conjuring,” and, perhaps, how poetry, in many ways, performs magically, while simultaneously (we know) always remaining a poem?
RZ: Yeah, I think you’re on point: the Laster here is the idea of a self that is “done” morphing. And yes, this poem is conjuring the hallucinations of a last image of the “self”, so that it can be properly seen as what it is: a spectre, an impossible projection, an attempt at controlling, rather than living in vulnerability of unknowing. In conjuring spectres, the poem, like sound, like Silence, allows us to get shit out of us. By framing the real conditions of existence within the spirit realm of the poem and in and naming what gets invisiblized here I think the poem allows us to merge a corporeal and metaphysical block around what identity is, what a self is. It’s like, were piled on with so many signifiers and identities and expectations and ideas when we’re born, shit, even when we’re still in the womb, that for me, life has been a peeling back of the layers, the masks, like in Scooby Doo. And I think for a while I was trying to get to the final one, the Laster, so I could “know” who I was, “really,” “finally,” and yet—its masks all the way down. And then there’s attachment to our form(s), and loss of form(s), and the love you made one day in a car and the pink sky in the mirror, and the light thrumming on your pillow the next year as you cried into it, and that’s all gone, and never were, and always were. And the poem gathers all this, and says, “It’s all here. It’s always.” And then the poem, like smoke, like dream, dissipates. For all that is meant to last fades, stays hidden. Poems have to be conjured otherwise they wouldn’t be poems. They’d be performative sentences that have a goal. A 10 step success path. Life has no goal. There’s no winning, or ending. Except, maybe, since I’m mawkish, I’ll posit: love. Which is attention, and understanding, and knowing, and letting, and being with, and holding, and a million other gestures and positions—a polyversic haptics of care.
CK: The final couplets hint toward an ending but circles back around. I find myself, after multiple readings, looking at the poem like Finnegans Wake, that the last word connects to the beginning and the reader (and speaker) is on an endless loop.
of meaning & wish: trite regurgitation of poisonous pith
I don’t want to admit it but I’ll be glad one day I bet
(a gaunt ghost of sentiment) for all this to end
to forget what I’d wished ought not to’ve ever been
These moments relate back to the “endless shuffling / of meaning & wish:”; how, at times, these elements can point toward a “trite regurgitation of poisonous pith:”; there is also the “bet” that the speaker, in their current incarnation, will be glad “for all this to end,” and “this,” as with the poem, pleasurably frustrates and diffuses meaning: what are all of the things “this” can imply? Life, the poem, being, identities, the work/play alluded to throughout, others, etc. Also, I love the final line’s note “to forget what I’d wished ought to’ve never been” in that, personally, I often “wish to forget” and this line reverses that thought. At the same time both things—the wish to forget and to “forget what I’d wished”—are almost always impossible. It is as if once one possesses knowledge, the various identities, the different practices, one can never return to a time before. Rose, how does the end balance this interstice, this moment of holding contradictory thoughts and feelings? How, in some ways, does the poem do this? How is poetry this wish we know will not come true?
RZ: The end, I think, is a resignation in a way to ceding control and embracing vulnerability. It’s hopeful, hopelessly, in a way. I’ll be glad for all the obsessive attempts to control my “self,” which is the Earth, to end, to finally want everything, to be okay with everything. I believe as I/we age, and this has been true so far, that my self-consciousness and neurosis has/will fade(d). I get softer. We get softer. And I agree we can’t un-be anything we’ve been, but the illusions that we clung to can fade from consciousness. They help us get to be who we are, but they fade. In this way they (we) are presently absent and absently present. They are always with us—everything we’ve ever done/seen/been/etc—and they are gone too. This interstitial you mention is the nonbinary—it’s the idea of both/and in addition to either/or. The contradiction is key to being. The idea of a pure ontology is frankly violent. The nonbinaries I write are dedicated to this way of thinking and being that is fugitive and messy and anarchic. It’s like our selves. We’re never only just one. (And yet, we are.) Poetry is the wish of the Earth. I don’t know if it can be/come true or not, because I’m not even sure if its promise is calculable.
CK: Rose, I can’t thank you enough for your time and this wonderful opportunity to talk about this stunning poem. What else is new? What else have you been working on?
RZ: Thanks, Charles!!! I’m planning a conversation right now with my friend and superb fiction writer Bella Bravo for a little series of talks / mini-conference about the Undercommons and Destituent Power. The convo is on November 14th and is called “Ante-Politics: Self-Defense of the Surround,” and will be facilitated by my friend the brilliant poet/being Ross Gay and will feature Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and some more wonderful folks. Otherwise, I’m doing school and I’m making a bunch of short experimental films right now. It’s been fun. And writing a novel. And some theory… And looking at the sky, always. Which is to say, outer space. Which is to say, broadening our ceilings. Our sealed-in. And poems, yeah, always. And watching the Earth breathing. Being the Earth breathing. Together. And touching without touch. And taking naps under sycamore trees in cemeteries. That’s work: to rest. In this society? Yeah, absolutely. Lately I have had this sentence stuck in my head, “I am in pain and I need love.” That’s been my mantra. Let’s share that. Let’s let pain be a sound that summons love. Let’s all sing it now.
ROSE ZINNIA was born in Akron, Ohio and is the author of the chapbooks Golden Nothing Forever (Nonbinary), Abracadabrachrysanthemum, Hands, and River (with Ross Gay). Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in West Branch, The Tenderness Project, The Ocean State Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Monster House Press, Peach Mag, Bad Nudes, & elsewhere. They live with their wolfdog, Kiki, in Bloomington, Indiana where ze are an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Indiana University and a book/graphic designer. Ze co-edit w the trees + poiesis.