On Muse Found in a Colonized Body, lovemaking, and activism:  Interview with Yesenia Montilla by Mihaela Moscaliuc

On Muse Found in a Colonized Body, lovemaking, and activism:  Interview with Yesenia Montilla by Mihaela Moscaliuc

 

Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry & Poetry in translation. She is CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. Her work has been published in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and in Best of American Poetry 2020 and 2021. Her first collection The Pink Box is published by Willow Books & was longlisted for a PEN award. Her second collection Muse Found in a Colonized Body is forthcoming from Four Way Books, 2022. She lives in Harlem, NY. Find her at www.yeseniamontilla.com

 

Mihaela Moscaliuc:  Your new collection, Muse Found in a Colonized Body, for which I’ve been waiting so eagerly since your astonishing debut The Pink Box, is coming out from Four Way Books this fall. The opening poem begins, “They say when the Spaniards came we thought them/gods,” announcing a speaker whose collective voice is informed by particular historical experiences. Can you talk a bit about your writing in relation to Afro-Latinidad and your Afro-Caribbean roots?

Yesenia Montilla: Yes, so the collection is asking, I hope, a clear central question which is: how do we survive? The survival of it is not limited to the future; if Octavia Butler’s writing has taught us anything it is that Black people will exist in the future. So, the central question of the collection has to do with survival in all places in time: how did we survive, how do we survive, how are we surviving. My Afro-Latinidad and my roots in the Caribbean get tied to my American identity through Blackness. I am not separate from it just because my ancestors were brought to Santo Domingo instead of the American South. As a person of color with ties back to Africa I have a responsibility regardless of how light my skin might be, regardless of what languages I speak, to fight for our survival, to find pleasure and joy in this life while also persevering in the face of white supremacy. These labels which I use, “Afro-Latina, Black, Afro-Caribbean”, will eventually, and should eventually, be rendered useless, if those of us who have lived under the weight of whiteness can somehow come together, fight together, and see each other as one. Of course, there is another personal underlying concern: I am not just Black, I also have white ancestry, and so grappling with the fact that my ancestors might have been unsavory & ruthless, that my family subscribed to the idea that whiteness is good and Black bad, and that I grew up being chased by those ghosts and those ideals, is also a theme.

 

Mihaela Moscaliuc: The collection’s title provides an important entry into the book: Muse Found in a Colonized Body. This is also the title of a poem whose sections are interspersed, poignantly, throughout. I read the “colonized body” as referencing  histories of enslavement, colonization, and other forms of occupation or oppression that have scarred and traumatized personal and collective bodies, and that continue to do so, if in slightly different forms. What does it mean to find a muse at a site of devastation? Is this a muse that calls upon you (rather than a muse you call upon, as ‘tradition’ has it), a muse that demands attention?

Yesenia Montilla: When I started writing the poems for this collection I was reading a book on muses throughout history and what I gathered was that a lot of muses had no real autonomy over their bodies and their legacy. Pablo Picasso falls in love with Jacqueline and boom there is this wild painting of her and she looks unhappy and what the hell do we really know about the muse if not what the male lens allows. So I wanted to be clear in this collection that the muse was me and the artist was me and so that agency allows for a clarity that is truthful, and a narrative that is mine. Even when the muse seems to be someone else, or an event in the poems, I am still searching for myself within time and space, searching for myself in history.

Mihaela Moscaliuc: “I want to be more than what I know. I want to be/ the caretaker of lovely things—“ you write in section VII of “Muse Found in a Colonized Body.” You are this caretaker, as poems from both Muse Found in a Colonized Body and from The Pink Box attest. They speak to the deep care with which you tend to the world, including people, including heritage traditions, including beings other than humans and who are often more lovable than humans. At the same time, I read these lines in relation to the profound sorrow at the heart of the book: How can you love with the kind of intense, radical, altruistic love you desire and are capable of when each day you are confronted with evidence of our longstanding and entrenched history of structural and systemic racism and injustice? I’m thinking, among other poems, of “Philando Castile’s Name is So Beautiful I Remember Love Making,” which memorializes Castile, one of the many victims of police violence, and of this stanza: “We lost the small/window of time where both/our bodies could’ve been naked/in bed petitioning poetry/to save us & now all we have /is the starkness of Black/bodies lying everywhere/on roadsides,//in the car,/outside the bodega,/near the docks.” I’m thinking also of poems like “Hamilton Heights Starbucks” and “La Bodega-A Gentrification Story,” which remind that “Middle Passage is still happening” and that racism persists on our streets and in community spaces, including national cultural institutions like Lincoln Center; the latter displaced and erased what used to be the Black and Latino/a thriving artist community of San Juan Hill that Duke Ellington celebrated in “San Juan Hill”).

What helps you sustain love and hope and the desire to be the “caretaker of lovely things”? Does the process of writing play a part in it? How?

Yesenia Montilla: I am almost crying reading your question, because the weight of it all is so much. I have been so lucky in this lifetime that I have, for whatever reason, found myself miraculously in spaces with Black Lesbian Feminists who teach me so much about the movement towards freedom, who teach me so much about caretaking through writing, about honoring and interrogating history. Women who are students of Audre Lorde in a way that often seems supernatural and quite transcendent. I am thinking of Cheryl Boyce Taylor, I am thinking of Alexis De Veaux, I am thinking of Alexis Pauline Gumbs. I am also a student of Adrienne Maree Brown’s work, and Pleasure Activism was a central text to creating this collection. The only things that sustain me are the poems, the community — my beloveds. My community is vast and loving and often the only tool I have to help me get up from bed after tragedy strikes over and over. You know our time on earth is a blip in what is the expansiveness of the universe and so it is wise to figure out what is it that you want to see during your last exhale, and for me LOVE is what I want to see. I want to know I loved fiercely and fought to have joy and for others to have joy too, if nothing else.

Mihaela Moscaliuc: Who are some of the writers and artists who have inspired /who inspire you and how?

Yesenia Montilla: So many, I feel as though there are few writers or artists that don’t get me riled up and deeply inspired. I will say the names of June Jordan and Lucille Clifton as to me they were prophets. I will say that Aracelis Girmay, Ross Gay, and John Murillo have the language and imagery that I return to over and over. I will say that Ada Limon, Natalie Diaz and Rachelle Eliza Griffiths teach me about voice and being present in the body in a magical way. Besides all the folks I’ve mentioned I also have to name a few spellcasters: Kathy Engel, Patrick Rosal, Roberto Carlos Garcia, Peggy Robles Alvarado, Ari Banias, Ricardo Maldonado, Denice Frohman, Christina Olivares, Jericho Brown, Marwa Helal, Elizabeth Acevedo and those are just contemporary poets of color — we will be here for days if I start to talk about those that came before.

Mihaela Moscaliuc: A number of poems allude to or reference the concept of double consciousness. Introduced into social and political thought by Du Bois in an article in 1897 and then in his groundbreaking The Souls of Black Folk (1903), it pointed to the inward “twoness” experienced by African-Americans because of their racialized oppression in a white-dominated society. DuBois described it as  “a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” and as “two unreconciled strivings,” “two warring ideals.”  Do you remember the first time you became aware of experiencing/having experienced double consciousness? Do you remember the first poem you wrote that captured or grappled with it?

Yesenia Montilla: I never graduated high school, I earned my GED when I was 19, did a brief stint at Fordham University, and didn’t return to school to complete my B.A. till I was in my 30s. A lot of what I’ve read and learned was for a long time self-guided and self-taught. I am a voracious reader and I want to know everything from the possibility of time travel to different modalities for thriving health in the 21^st Century. I read The Souls of Back Folk on my own in my 20s and I remember keeping a pocket dictionary with me (before cell phones) in order to look up words I didn’t understand. What I remember keenly when reading this book, while working as a receptionist at a small communications firm, was understanding performance as survival, code switching and the splitting of my own consciousness in order to transcend what whiteness had already deemed me to be: a dropout, child of immigrants with no wealth and a 99% probability of poverty. I can’t pinpoint when I started thinking about it with regard to my work, but I will say that as a kid I was always writing, and that I think the reason I gave up on it then and didn’t come back to it sooner was probably because I had not learned how to write for myself and not the white gaze and when you write for something other than your own knowing, your own learning/unlearning, then you’re writing without joy and that is so hard to sustain — it’s quite impossible actually.

Mihaela Moscaliuc: Which was the hardest poem to start or finish in this collection, and what made it particularly so?

Yesenia Montilla: The poem I have revised the most is “Notes on Self-Care.” Maybe because it is a nod to Hikmet’s “On Living” and Girmay’s “On Kindness.” Maybe because it’s about fantasizing, and it reflects a part of me that I wasn’t sure I was ready to share. Maybe because of Idris — I have 20 versions of that poem and the only thing that keeps me from going back and revising it is it being in the book and Ada Limon having chosen it for the Slowdown, but if it were not printed anywhere, I’d still be revising it, I’d still be unsure of whether what I was trying to say was really said.

Mihaela Moscaliuc: In Muse there’s anger and anguish and an urgency to articulate these sentiments with precision and texture.  There is also love, lovemaking, longing, and these too carry onto the page with exactitude, in dictions that are at once sharp, unadorned, but rich in figurative layering and music.  “My body is a small     cave door/it’s a slick whale       a jubilant/sea of tall grass that sways/& makes its way across countries,” begins, for instance, “Searching for My Own Body.”  How do you see the relationship between love and activism?

Yesenia Montilla: I mentioned before Adrienne Maree Brown and her work Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. In it she writes: “I believe our imaginations—particularly the parts of our imaginations that hold what we most desire, what brings us pleasure, what makes us scream yes—are where we must seed the future, turn toward justice and liberation, and reprogram ourselves to desire sexually and erotically empowered lives.” When I read that, a star exploded in me. Love, lovemaking, pleasure are all central to my activism. I can’t be engaged in radical imagination if I am not actively in love with myself, my body, fine ass Idris Elba, my friends, my beloved. I refuse to engage in the notion that my body is undesirable. I am gorgeous, I deserve pleasure, I deserve beauty, and in affirming that I am filling and refilling my well and this is what keeps me writing, dreaming, breathing. Pleasure is not something that should be unattainable, for anyone, and lovemaking should be as much of a ritual as when I kneel at my altar and talk with my ancestors. There will be no liberation without these tools and so yes, I will always write about my body, lovemaking, mouths, touch, because all of it should be central to activism work.

Mihaela Moscaliuc: Your words remind me also of Audre Lorde’s teachings on living and loving “in the trenches” and on caring for oneself as “an act of political warfare.”

You mention “tools,” so I want to switch gears briefly and ask about the toolbox. Which are some of the craft elements or crafting tools that most excite you at the moment?

Yesenia Montilla: I love a good line break, a good enjambment. Poetry should be as much about surprise as interrogation. For me there is no greater tool for surprise than a good break in a line. Lately I’ve been experimenting more with spacing, and a lot of purists probably can’t stand, of course, that I end so many poems with an em dash, but for me poetry is not just about the poem, it’s also about what happens after you’ve finished reading it and about that moment of silence and internal dialogue that occurs between reader and poem. Once a poem has been read, it lives with the reader and they are now in a relationship and that em dash is there to honor that.

Mihaela Moscaliuc: I’d like to think that our readers will experience that, and much more, as they read  Muse Found in a Colonized Body, which will be out in just a month or so. John Murillo calls it as “one of the most scathing love letters [to America] in recent memory” and Aracelis Girmay reads it as “a catalog of touches and the legacies of touches,” with “[a]n erotic, present, dreaming power coursing through.” And I am grateful that you are willing to share with us work written since the completion of Muse. Can you say a few words about the six poems featured in this issue?

Yesenia Montilla: Yes, I am super excited about these poems. They are all new and not part of the Muse collection, so I am being vulnerable with Plume readers, and I hope I am rewarded for the bravery. Lately I’ve been thinking about climate change and about resurrection/reinvention/reincarnation. So these poems are attempting to thrive and radically dream, fantasize and be reborn while being acutely aware that I am on a dying planet. Also, I think the idea that we’re not separate from the planet creates a bit of tension and might ask: if the planet is dying, aren’t we dying too? We are dying of madness, dying of neglect, dying of capitalism & how do we grapple with that knowing and still fuck and dream and enjoy a good Bordeaux.

 

 

Blooming
When the wetness of April
is a slinky sloshing through
the slippery face of grief
& fear; we pray, not to a
god or to our better angels
shading themselves in the
palm tree of our misgivings,
but to ourselves. We ask
for: more time, more words,
more Sunday brunches; the
faces of those we love like
branches outstretched
towards the summer days.
I know I am not going to
die just yet because I have
no sense of urgency. No
harrowing late nights fighting
with language for meaning.
No fever dreams with teeth
like dice rattling against the
grimy streets outside a bodega.
Everything I’ve ever wanted
is coming & that’s the fear —
What happens when desire
disappears like that one lover
you thought ghosted you but
really they were just decaying in
the walls of your memory?
Some call this time a flourishing,
I call it too a shedding.
A billion cells inside of me
behaving like snakes, dancing
like a mimosa tree in a rainstorm
turning the whole field the color
of sunset. Everything is growing
around me. Everything is coming
back to life; even me. I look at
myself in the mirror I see scapes,
fiddleheads, morels. There is no
god, my grandfather once declared.
I think god is destiny waiting on
the day in which
we finally
bloom —

 

 

Casual Extinction

 

What we did was too little & too late, the sad story of our species.
Chrisjen Avasarala, The Expanse S6E6

 

It is spring         the daffodils are
blooming on my kitchen sill
the cherry blossoms by the highway
on 125^th are pink feathered & dressed
for gala & blind dates

 

When I bend over to smell
the wild jasmines growing on the river’s
side I cannot believe there is war
& sickness still

 

In history there are times of petty
strife     & times of too many orange
peels steeping in the hot waters
making everything          bitter

 

We are living through both at once —

 

There will be no aliens to save us
No god             No silver-tongued
hero to put out our fires

 

Eric & I play a game called Last
Where we imagine          our last meal
our last song
our last love-making

It is a way of preparing for the casualness
of our extinction, we know the earth will
die        by our madness
& we                 by our neglect —

 

 

On Watching Jason Momoa Bathe in a Parking Lot on Earth Day

 

sex sells
& for that reason & that reason alone
a shirtless, board shorts-only-wearing Jason Momoa
greets me on my phone screen
he says he wants me to help him unplastic the planet
his shorts are not tied & start to slip
& I imagine replacing every plastic thing I own
for the sake of the planet
for the sake of the trees & especially the oceans & its inhabitants
for the sake of getting an A on this assignment
for the sake of the reward
he doesn’t know that when I went to the theater to see him
I forgot my aluminum water bottle & had to buy a plastic one
he doesn’t know I bought a ninja plastic blender because the non
plastic Vitamix was just so fucking expensive
he’s Jason Momoa, he gets to choose to live in his van, in a parking lot
somewhere sunny & beautiful.
If he weren’t so pretty with his pink
towel & bath robe I would think him pretentious. But judgement
is not a way to change the world —
I’d rather get him in bed, whisper sweet talk in his ear
as I nibble — about how not everyone can afford
non plastic things, nibble — how some of us are concerned with how
to make rent, nibble — or put food on the table. Nibble, how capitalism makes it
impossible for anyone to have the time or energy to care about the
planet. How unconscious people cannot make consciously sound
choices. How unconscious people are led to believe
that they are responsible for the planet’s demise, when really, we know
capitalism —
After a good ride I’d turn to him
his eyes still on fire from how
good I performed
his left eyebrow with that scar that looks like a lightening
bolt lifts as if asking me for a story
& I’ll tell him about the time at Kathy’s
the whole ocean in front of me as if it had just been born
& the whales how they came so close to the shore
how I wept when I saw them, how that moment burns in my memory
as loudly as his love-making
how I knew then, plastic or not, I will be long gone, all of us will
but the whales, the whales, I am rooting for them —

 

 

What if Money Could Die?

 

there is a place I’ve heard of
where money grows on trees
real pretty like paper lanterns
hanging from branches
all the greens & reds, the purples & yellows
international money

 

big pharma amid a
pandemic money
Amazon money
sweatshop to get you your
iPhone LX money                      there is
university money that looks more like working
three jobs to pay that loan money —
there too is fuck me money that drops down & gets its eagle on

 

there’s even money for getting people across borders
this money is crumpled up but full of
promise
I even heard there is oil money & this money chokes
the trees            stunts their growth
it falls to the ground like autumn foliage, it likes to
have a front row seat                  to watch the tree
die —

 

there is this place I’ve heard of
where money is all the rage
& those that
got the most of it get to own all the        beauty —

 

I was always told money does not
grow on            trees
I know of 1% that will beg
to differ —

 

 

Spell Casting While on Zoom

 

I don’t miss conference rooms
The way I would fidget with my pen
because why not, white men don’t actually
see me              not even
when they’re killing        me
& my pussy, how it clenched & released,
an ebb & flow as I kegeled my way from one
meeting to another

 

daydreaming —

 

Sometimes I would daydream about being home
Sometimes I would daydream of poem-making
Sometimes I would daydream of release

 

I am home now
I am poem-making
Still daydreaming                        but now
I get to orgasm whenever I                      want

 

Spell casting

 

is exhausting                  the magic is to give
a drop of blood in lieu of a pint of tears

 

I prefer tears
I’ve always been so good             at crying

 

When the boss asks: what are you working on today?

 

I say:     audits
I mean: survival
I mean: I want to be nouveau rich not nouveau witch
I light candles
I take baths with honey & basil leaves torn by my own fingers
I repeat my incantations like an Ariana song
I say: thank you, next to everything & everyone
I am hungry for hands, there isn’t enough & my lover tires

 

Bless him, he doesn’t realize he lives with a goddess. Touching me
as if I were just another human girl —

 

So when I kneel before the ancestors & they
ask:                   what do you want?

 

I say:                 give me a million dollars                  
or its equivalent in touch —

 

Poem With No Bra In It

 

I can tell you the day, the last time I put one on. First week of March, it was a
T                  H                 U                 R                  S                  D                  A                  Y
the Director had said: let’s all work from home tomorrow and see how it feels. It felt braless
that is how it felt. A day without the constraint seemed a miracle & now
103 days later, my breasts are like teenagers without a care, rule breakers with no real
place to go but down. I cannot lie, I have become concerned, everything needs
some type of structure. Or is that the capitalist in me? Am I hedge funding my two
beauties, am I clamoring for them to be productive, perky, tasteful and tame? I have
scoured the internet for soft, barely there feeling ones, smooth & unwired, but who
would dare make such an item in my size. No one really cares about big girls anyway,
how we need things that fit & feel petal-like with just a little lift but almost not there.

Or how on some days they might even need a hand to hold them up, so that the
weightlessness could be a kind of deliverance, a B cup right now would be my
salvation. Listen, I gotta run my breasts are calling, they are saying:

 

so this is freedom
you will be lucky if we
ever squeeze back in —

 

 

 

Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry & Poetry in translation. She is CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. Her work has been published in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and in Best of American Poetry 2020 and 2021. Her first collection The Pink Box is published by Willow Books & was longlisted for a PEN award. Her second collection Muse Found in a Colonized Body is forthcoming from Four Way Books, 2022. She lives in Harlem, NY. Find her at www.yeseniamontilla.com