There’s nowhere I’ve ever felt like I belong. Does anyone? Some say they do. Some appear to fit. Both seem to enjoy it very much, and draw power from what they call “their people” there. But maybe that’s just how it seems when you aren’t where someone else is.
This is a feeling I try to capture and understand. I am thankful that such a poem, “Lye,” was included in the summer 2023 issue of Italian Americana.
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When we were little, we were taught that our country was a melting pot. This was idealized, oversimplified, of course. People aren’t supposed to melt. Who controls that kind of fire, and why? It is right to examine the complexities of that message, of that experience.
Virginia creeper grows in my yard here in Arkansas and did in southern Illinois where I was raised, where my mother’s family lived for centuries. Its star shape led me to consider power in “Burned Sugar.” “Etiology” is the study of origins, and the poem of that name navigates the first- and second-generation immigrant experience of my father’s family.
My father’s family. My mother’s family. Both my family, melted and not. These poems appear in the Spring 2022 issue of Zone 3.
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“Snake, Not Serpent; Hopelessness, Not Despair” is one of my very favorite poems. It breaks all sort of rules that well-meaning folks gave me about language and construction and art. It faces prejudices I had about half of myself, ones I had internalized so well that I didn’t realize I could think otherwise. And now, when I find I’m holding my tongue, not because I’m listening (a good and right space) but out of subservience and fear and shame and doubt, it reminds me why, and shakes me loose of that grip.
This sonnet first appears in Issue 22 of The Common (yes, I am behind in posting), then in my latest book Sunset Cue, and you can read it online via the link above here.
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Angie Macri 