Interviews 2025 (49-56):
Trivedi, Geolingo, Siken, Yebio

The Shore Interview #49: Disha Trivedi

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: Your poem, “Martha’s Vineyard,” clearly hinges on ruminations of witnessing wealth in its titular location. But while the poem opens on this image, it does not end on it, but seemingly goes beyond it. How do you see this contrast adding meaningful “ripples” to the poem’s surface level concerns?

DT: The poem ends on this “ship of salt and air.” That’s not very substantial. Poetry isn’t either, but we write it, we read it, we need it. Maybe a poem is a ship, an end, an escape. In “a ship of salt and air,” there exists the possibility of nourishment. Salt is so important to the balance of our body’s chemistry and we need air to breathe, but it’s still just salt, just air. It’s not a ship that holds much weight, but it doesn’t need to. It’s like the pixie-dusted Peter Pan ship crossing the night sky—an unlikely possibility that’s nice to believe in. And maybe that’s enough.

EF: Color is highlighted throughout your poem, from images of the speaker’s “brown face,” to their peers as “gold children,” that are “marked” by the island’s “white sails” and “white linens.” The poem goes further, though, complicating these initial colors with “striper” fish and a “silent fishing line…invisible but motion / tugging” and how the poem points to these invisible lines that imply the connectivity of all the poem’s subjects. Can you speak to your process of meaningfully balancing this interplay of color and is there a “color” image you are surprised ended up in your poem’s palate?

DT: It's hard to speak about my process as intentional because my first drafts aren’t very intentional. My poems begin as subconscious image sequences, like a half-remembered film that I’m writing down. Line breaks are like jump cuts, flashbacks intercede, words are sort of actors. I draft poems based on how those images appear and how words sound when I describe them. The colors come from what’s present in those images.

I keep a good record of drafts, so I looked back at the first draft of this poem (which was not titled “Martha’s Vineyard”). “Salmon” was present twice. As were “white pants” and “white marina” and “non-white face,” though none of those descriptions are in the final version. “Brown” took a few drafts to appear. The speaker doesn’t really want to show her face, especially in a place, or poem, where “brown” doesn’t seem to belong.

“Salmon” feels like it catches the color of New England. Salmon shorts and salmon dinners and salmon sunrise over the ocean. I’m not surprised that color persisted through my drafts. I am surprised that I didn’t write about the ocean, which is very color-rich. The poem circles the idea of the ocean, with reference to salt, water, ripples, stripers, sails. I’m curious why I omitted a description of the ocean, but I like that I did. The poem is grounded on the island. Marooned, maybe, in its lines. The New England that I know is a place of lines—hidden, imagined, material and sometimes magical, if we’re lucky, or if we can afford the price.

EF: I am fascinated by the implications of the moment where the “I” of the poem is at a pizza place and explains how “one man stares at me / so deeply I can’t tell whether to be / concerned.” The enjambment on “whether to be” suggests this momentary existential crisis for the “I”, emphasizing the “concern” in the following line more than passing humor or awkward interaction, but perhaps a deeper concern of self-perception. As a physical location, and as a human interaction, what felt vital about writing toward this moment in the poem and its centrality to a poem about Martha’s Vineyard?

DT: I wrote the first draft of this poem a few years ago during a sailboat race at Martha’s Vineyard, the first large race that I’d done. That was a week of salt spray and sprained ankles and sails lifted in changing wind. At night, I fell asleep on the sailboat’s deck, under a blanket of marine fog, feeling the tide shifting beneath me.

That week felt too charmed to be real.

At the race reception with the sailing team I’d crewed with, I looked around at the attendees, other sailors, all haloed by the golden hour, and looking broke the spell: I was the only non-staff person of color present at the party. Then a man as golden as the hour stood up and gave a speech that started with this sentence: “Sailing is a dying sport.” He went on to discuss methods to resuscitate it.

One method that he mentioned is to make sailing more accessible to people who look less like him and more like me. That’s easier said than done. Sailing is a world that is very much about who you know, how they know you, how you get along. I’m a brown girl who picked up sailing in her early twenties while pursuing higher education at an institution with a robust sailing program. I’m not who you might expect to be a sailor, but I love it anyway. I love the grit of salt between my palms and ropes, the days of sun and water, the self-reliance the sport requires, even in a community of sailors who welcomed me into this strange, exclusive world. I love everything about sailing except that exclusivity.

This poem came out of writing into the dissonance of feeling at home out on the ocean and out of place on the island. The poem is caught in the middle distance, under the sails that flocked the Vineyard’s waters for the duration of my time there.

EF: Are there any journals or magazines you're currently enjoying?

DT: A friend sent me the latest issue from Occulum and there’s a lot I love about it, like Helen Victoria Murray’s poem “Prometheus waits for the eagle to text him back.” Rattle is a mainstay, especially their “Poets Respond” series. Other places that I read include Maudlin House, Broken Antler, body fluids, Rust & Moth and wildness. Recently, three writer friends and I co-founded a literary magazine, M E N A C E—a space for modern gothic horror and the “literary weird.” We’re actively seeking poetry submissions for our summer issue.

I’m also in a workshop with Sam Cha about long poems, so lately I’ve been reading more poetry collections to understand how poets arrange a set of poems or a long poem. Jimin Seo’s OSSIA has been on my shelf for months; now that I’m finally getting around to it, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever read. Musical, tactile, eerie. And so beautifully designed. Other collections that I’ve recently enjoyed include Good Monster by Diannely Antigua, savings time by Roya Marsh and Return by Emily Lee Luan.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

DT: I love how this question sent me on a quest to close-read the poems in this issue. Here’s two poems who explore science, hope, and loss through wildly different forms: Elizabeth Wing’s “Rasputin asks for a second cup of wine” and Ellis Purdie’s “Elegy for a Biologist.”

“Elegy for a Biologist” works in compact paragraphs that mirror their subject matter—the eponymous biologist’s “work of honoring carcass.” Grief, like a carcass, is “a specimen too broken to keep.” Yet the speaker suggests that when a loved one dies, the entropy of grief can be ordered in a way that borrows from scientific order, which categorizes death and its disintegration. In the poem, the speaker finds meaning in the mess of grief by condensing grief  into a series of keepsakes sent into the afterlife with loved ones, and finally, with the speaker themselves. Through these objects, the poem asks, what do we bring to death and beyond? What do we hope would persist beyond death? For the speaker, the hope is that love persists, in the form of “the gray fox skull I would cradle / in the crook of my arm, hold my hand / and hand to you, should we wake again.”

In contrast to the order that defines “Elegy,” “Rasputin asks for a second cup of wine” breaks form, with lines and phrases that leap across the page in the same way that the speaker, who I read to be an adult revisiting their memory of childhood, would do. Much like “Elegy,” the poem ends with a direct second-person address that holds both finality and hope. While “Elegy” uses science to process the death of beloveds, “Rasputin” uses science to frame the death of innocence, the death of the idea of infinite knowledge and infinite selves, as the speaker admits a variety of magical yet scientific occupations: “Sometimes I said I could make the blood clot . . . Or an egg yolk examiner / or the one they bring in to keep the heart pumping when they cut a / man open, / or the one who studies the sun.” 

The next line is both devastating and resigned: “But it is a fact that I am a child up after bedtime. / Please. I am eavesdropping in the hallway.” The speaker seeks to be let into the dizzy world of wine-tinged knowledge yet knows that knowledge strips away the infinite possibility of imagination and the innocence that accompanied that childlike sense of possibility.

Through forms that diverge as much as their subjects converge, both poems explore the containment and curiosity that science offers to make sense of grief, whether the grief that follows the death of loved ones or the grief that comes from growing up.

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Disha Trivedi is from Northern California. Her poetry and fiction appears in Rust & Moth, Rogue Agent, The Women's Issue anthology from The Harvard Advocate and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.

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The Shore Interview #50: Jaiden Geolingo

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: When I first read your poems, “Boyhood Requiem” and “Contrapuntal for My Dead Loves,” I found myself taken by how they lent themselves to being put in conversation with one another. In fact, they seem to compliment one another because of the different stakes they have. What can you tell us about the way you see these two pieces working together and perhaps in a larger project of yours?

JD: Thank you so much for having me! Both of these pieces emerged from the notion of displacement. “Contrapuntal for My Dead Love” was a letter to the South and how it affected the things in my life, both through personal growth and through the accompanying environment. “Boyhood Requiem” resulted from an observation in the South: I noticed that the people around me categorized masculinity through interests: what cologne you wear, what songs you listen to, or what kind of life you lead in general. Both poems, to me, are intertwined in that theme of disorganization and alienation and they’re told by a speaker who is constantly in this space of disorder. I’m glad that you agree they compliment each other! While I don’t think they’re in direct conversation, I know they stemmed from the same corner.

EF: With the three readings of “Contrapuntal for My Dead Loves,” how do you see each “I” inhabiting each reading as distinct from one other? And what felt urgent about these three readings that you turned to this form?

JD: “Contrapuntal for My Dead Loves” came from a moment in my life where I wanted to communicate with the ground I step on. In this piece, my “dead love” is not a singular subject; it expands into a larger scale—into a geographical area like the South that has been a large part of my life. Before writing this, I already had the concept of writing a contrapuntal in mind; although, unraveling the intent behind this form is what stumped me during the first round of creation. Initially, I wanted to focus on a singular Southern experience—such as the floods and hurricanes—and then tie it into a larger symbol. However, I had an innate feeling that told me to derail from everything and erase the linearity; eventually, it became abstract and an amalgamation of the South and I, split into two perspectives.

I never grew up in the South. I lived in the Philippines my whole life until I migrated to the United States around three years ago—and due to that assimilation, discovering what the South was like from a foreign eye grew to be a more foreign feeling than the immigration process. This played a part in the “splitting” within the form: my identity in this region was never solidified. On the left hand side of the poem, I am talking to a phantom: someone to pour my thoughts into—and I exposed my want to them. The “I” in this section refers to me, the writer and the crescendoing emotions I wanted to express about this region.

And yet, on the right hand side, the “I” is the South itself. With each line, the South retaliates, aware of their roughness, told through lines like “enter & I, a dead love, will turn into wolves.” I intended to personify the South as well because I believed that the splitting of the contrapuntal would be redundant without a contrasting element—in this case, the subject of the poem. These two segments differed in the speaker and, ultimately, will contribute to the merging of the sections.

The unification of both voices was rough to say the least. Like I said earlier, both sections were told through me and through the South. However, combining those perspectives was both exasperating and fulfilling. Instead of turning into a singular reading with no meaning, it became more of a conversation between the South and I—a soft understanding of both perceptions that I wanted to depict through lines like “I autopsy your teeth & I find prayers made of alcohol / I want to confess my mouth outward.” There’s no animosity to the South to me. We’re cordial, as much as I want to leave and return to my home country. I still love it. It’s still a home.

EF: In “Boyhood Requiem,” there are four single word, alliterative lines: “cologne,” “carmine,” “cliché” and “circuiting.” With the form of the poem clearly emphasizing these words, can you speak to what your drafting process that brought you to this current form, and in particular, these aligned words?

JD: Boyhood Requiem was a thrilling piece to write. It arose from being surrounded in an environment where people tend to notate “masculinity” through their interests and niches. Therefore, I structured the poem to be sporadic, stretching across the page to symbolize the rupture from societal expectations. I wanted these four words to radiate in a way that reflects the theme of the poem, so thank you for noticing that!

If you separate these words into a unified concept, they actually begin to converge into a list that recurs to the theme of toxic masculinity. Firstly, cologne as a symbol originated from the ideology that fragrance is the makeup counterpart to men, and that the scent you bore placed you in a hierarchy (which isn’t entirely true; I watched a video about this topic a few months ago, but I can’t remember the title for the life of me). Furthermore, I wanted carmine to mimic the hue of blood. I often think back to Ocean Vuong’s interview on Late Night with Seth Meyers, where he discusses the usage of a lexicon of violence in regards to masculinity. Harnessing that idea, I aimed to emphasize the violence that comes with masculinity through the word carmine.

Cliché and circuiting became more contradictory in terms of word choice. When the former set discussed the elements that come with masculinity, the latter discussed the elements involved in evading that standard—in simpler terms, cliché and circuiting became an outlet to criticize the Masculine-Complex. There’s a reason why people associate masculinity with toxicity (i.e., the term toxic masculinity); as I mentioned earlier, people categorize masculine behavior with superficiality: the things they possess, the things they wear, what music they listen to, etc. It’s cliché. Circuiting had a similar message: I wanted to convey the need most men possess in rewiring their personality and circuitry to conform with social trends; however, I also wanted to convey how they rewire themselves to step out of these trends.

Masculinity isn’t shameful. Individuality isn’t shameful. There’s still a delicate tenderness in not caring about what others think. That’s what I want people to gain from Boyhood Requiem. We’re all “still men / and still animals.”

EF: Are there any journals or magazines you’re currently enjoying?

JD: Yes! Currently, my favorite journal to read through is The Adroit Journal. Each piece in their issues deviates from the conventional literary magazine poem; instead of flowering imagery and an elegant undertone to rhythm, these pieces are more conversational and aggressive. They feel like car crashes or meteor strikes, or the feeling when your breath hitches once you run out of stamina. Ultimately, it feels hypnotic. When I first began writing poetry about a year ago, I always told myself that poetry is made up of verbose and metaphor-threaded words; however, reading more and more allowed me to unravel that poetry came down to the emotional invocation. The Adroit Journal became a reminder to me that beauty through words can come from simplicity.

A few honorable mentions are Rust + Moth, diode, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and POETRY!

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

JD: I love this question so much! To me, two poems that converse the best with each other are Beth Oast William’s “What Wood We’ve Become” and Le Wang’s “Hunting Season.” This is completely up to my interpretation, so take my insight with a grain of salt.

These poems address the intimacy of survival and violence, both thematically and stylistically. William’s poem involves her metaphorical transformation into instability in the aftermath of survival (the wood as a metaphor for something immobile, or something numb). This piece is littered with the diction of recovery, like the line “whatever it is we do / mid-dream to reset the clock”—which I interpreted as the stage of denial. In this poem, we are shown a constant aftermath after a significant event.

“Hunting Season” became more of the antithesis of “What Wood We’ve Become.” Instead of the yearning for survival, we are shown the theme of violence, told through the eyes of hunters in a paternal space. However, in a way, the speaker in “Hunting Season” inevitably learns what survival is through the violence. The father in this poem converses with his child, informing them about the delicacy of violence, how they “make a fortune off / dying things”. At first read, I didn’t see a connection between Wang’s and William’s poems; however, as I kept thinking about the violence that lingered between them—and the desperation of life (whether that be your own or another’s) seeping between each line, a linear string threaded them together. Additionally, aside from thematics, I noticed a similarity in both poet’s styles. Implementing mirroring images of brutality and nature, a link formed once I realized how each poet’s flow remained the same; as opposed to the standardized, abrupt flow that tends to come with violent poems, both of these pieces remained slow and unnerving. With each read, they grew to be more confessional than I realized and that is what I believe was the first connection that led me to these two becoming my pick. I loved reading all the poems in this issue so much! And, once again, thank you so much for having me. I’m truly honored.

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Jaiden Geolingo is a Pinoy writer based in Georgia, United States. He has been publicly recognized by The National YoungArts Foundation, The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Young Poets Network, among others. Additionally, his work can be found published or forthcoming in Dishsoap Quarterly, The Poetry Society, eunoia and other journals. Someday, he will be good at math.

The Shore Interview #51: Richard Siken

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: In “Fauna” there’s a presence of location and place, whether it’s a deer caught in something, the end of the world in LA, or the sign and the beach; and in “Strata” the “flat nastiness of Nebraska,” the Badlands of South Dakota, landfills and the side of the road. Then, there’s “Volta,” its titular turning, away and towards, is seemingly placeless, dislocated. How do you see movement, place, location, or lack thereof, working in this current collection of work?

RS: I think the whole collection is an attempt to locate a self. The poems in I Do Know Some Things show greater or lesser degrees of surety, starting with the experience of the stroke itself: I went back and locked the door and stood in front of the house to wait for my friend but I wasn’t standing in front of the house, I was lying on the sidewalk with my face in my shoulder bag because I couldn’t stand up… And then, in the hospital bed, there’s this: I swear to god, there must have been a day on the beach or a secret dip in the lake after dinner. I must have walked all night against the wind once, trying to get somewhere. There must have been. “Fauna” and “Strata” are in the final section of the book. By then, I’ve regained some sense of location and place. I think that’s the real recovery. Walking again is great, but being able to locate myself in the world was crucial.

EF: You’ve previously talked about the writing process of your forthcoming collection, including mentioning a process of writing out a piece then erasing bit by bit to its essence. What I’m curious about is if you could speak to your process of arranging I Do Know Some Things on a collection level, did you similarly use a process of excision, or were there gaps to fill?

RS: In the hospital, I made a list of terms I needed to understand—bed, floor, meat, noon—to see if I could find landmarks for meaning. It turned into a glossary, then a compilation of encyclopedia entries. My whole life was a gap to fill. I figured I’d start with the nouns and see if I could connect them. My understanding of the words led to stories or meditations on the words. The book accumulated around the words. The erasing happened in the rewrites. There were too many false leads, distractions and tangential ideas that strayed away from the the initial concern—the word—that just muddied up the thinking and the goal.

Looking at the table of contents, it’s odd that I chose these 77 terms to describe my life. I never expected that beet soup, cult leader and heart valve would be foundational. There were some words I had to add towards the end—true love, poetry—because those are fundamental also. But those were obvious choices.

The book moves forward in two ways. It follows my stroke and the aftermath chronologically, and around those moments are poems that are related by theme. The issues I was confronting in my recovery would remind me of other times I had confronted similar issues. “Fauna” was concerned with the idea that I might not fully recover. “Strata” was an attempt to look at the construction of the book and its layers as a strange accumulation of historical fact.

EF: When the friction of the sentence against the line is absent, is there something in its stead that you think a reader encounters when approaching prose as poetry that still creates that friction in other ways? Or do you consider there to be other tensions at work?

RS: Breaking a line makes a powerful friction between the unit of the sentence and the unit of the line. You lose a lot when you decline to use it. I wasn’t able to break the line. Everything was so disconnected it didn’t make sense to break anything when I was trying so hard to stitch everything back together. I think the power of the poems comes in the spaces between the sentences. To use associative leaps is a craft choice, but it’s also a representation of how I was thinking, how I’m still thinking. Everything jumps around. I take the long way around to get to meaning. The recovery from a brain injury isn’t focused on healing the damaged area, it’s focused on growing new neural pathways around the damaged area. My thinking, my language, goes around the damaged areas. It circles lost memories and gaps in logic. I think the actual experience of my recovery is the actual poetry of it.

EF: What have you been reading lately that influences your work or thinking?

RS: I asked for a replacement question and got this one, which concerns the same thing. When you ask a question, you have to be prepared for the possible answers. When faced with an uncomfortable question, you have the choices of answering, lying, or deflecting. You are giving me an opportunity to pull you into my private world, which is something I rarely do. Complicating that is the fact that I can’t read yet. Not without great difficulty. I don’t like admitting it. I can’t follow and I can’t track. If it’s longer than a page, I have to reread it many times. To understand the basics, I have to take notes. I’m pretty good with conversation, but with poems and stories I’m at a loss.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

RS: I think this is a great question. I think you should ask this question of everyone. Answering it is beyond my current skill set. I have successfully defined some words and made some paragraphs. That’s the book I have. That’s all I have. I still get lost in the supermarket. I still blank out when asked simple questions. I smile a lot because that makes people happy but I am hiding as much of my damage as I can. I still have a long way to go.

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Richard Siken is a poet and painter. His book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by Louise Glück, a Lambda Literary Award, a Thom Gunn Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (forthcoming, Copper Canyon Press, 2025). Siken is a recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

The Shore Interview #52: Yishak Yohannes Yebio

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: Hi Yishak, what immediately drew me to your work were the different ways each of your respective poems deals with the past. In “Theory of Falling,” the “I” reckons with being told they were “born in the wrong century,” and hearing “not the Earth’s heartbeat / but the sound of graves shifting.” The poem predominantly responds grammatically, by shifting into hypothetical “if I could, I would” modals, then future tense, before settling back into the present. “The Walk Home,” on the other hand, responds to the past more formally, switching from tercet stanzas, to alternating couplets and quatrains, only switching fully to past tense in the final stanza. Reading them now, how does the idea of time play with the known and unknown in your poems?

YYY: In both poems, time isn’t a fixed backdrop. It’s something the speaker is actively negotiating, testing and rethreading to make sense of what can be held and what can’t.

In “Theory of Falling,” the hypothetical modals (“if I could, I would…”) open a speculative space that tries to rewrite inherited realities—war, violence, displacement—into something gentler. The movement into future tense feels like a reach toward an imagined survivability, even if it can’t be fully realized. By the poem’s end, returning to the present is less a resolution than an acknowledgment that the unknown (what could have been, what could still be) will always run parallel to the known (what is).

In “The Walk Home,” time shifts less in grammar than in architecture. The change in stanza form enacts a kind of spatial rearranging, like memory inserting itself into the present moment. The past enters slowly through sensory triggers (the smell of citrus, the sound of collisions) until, in the final stanza, the verb tense fully concedes to it. Here, the unknown isn’t a speculative future but the fluid, unstable nature of memory itself, emblematic of how we can never be sure when it will surface or what it will demand from us.

In both, the known is tactile and immediate, while the unknown hovers in temporal shifts: a century one wasn’t meant for, a childhood afternoon reappearing decades later. Time becomes a medium that blurs the edges between them, making the poems less about chronology and more about permeability. How our past, present and imagined futures keep slipping into each other.

EF: In “The Walk Home,” there is a constant domesticity that the poem revolves around. Many images cycle through the senses, with multiple using synesthesia, like my favorite one: “talc-sweet hush.” What role do you see the domestic space playing in this poem, or in your work more broadly? And are there unconventional spaces or situations that also conjure this “domesticity” for you?

YYY: In “The Walk Home,” the domestic space acts less as a static setting and more as a vessel for holding fragments of time. The kitchen, the smell of citrus, the clatter of dishes—all of these become not just background, but active participants in the poem’s associative movement. Domesticity here is a kind of anchor: it allows the speaker to move between the now and remembered past without losing their footing. It’s a tactile, sensory framework that can absorb both quiet intimacy and sudden memory.

More broadly in my work, domesticity isn’t only tied to the literal home. It’s any space where the body can briefly exhale, where the senses are allowed to arrange the world in familiar patterns. Sometimes that’s a kitchen table; other times it’s a bus seat, a public library aisle, or a friend’s porch at dusk. I find domesticity in moments of shared ritual. The snapping green beans with a relative, mending a shirt in silence, walking home with groceries, whether they happen in a private room or in the middle of a crowded street.

Unconventional “domestic” spaces often surface in my poems as places where care is improvised: like a temporary shelter made of conversation. They’re not always safe, but they are places where the self can briefly locate itself—much like in “The Walk Home,” where the scent of cut fruit stitches disparate afternoons together into a single, livable moment.

EF: I keep finding myself drawn to the title, “Theory of Falling,” for its multi-faceted potency, especially in how it can be applied to individual lines, stanzas, or the whole poem, in multiple ways. Could you tell us some of your favorite applications of this title to specific instances or threads within the poem?

YYY: I love that you noticed how “Theory of Falling” can refract differently depending on where you hold it in the poem. For me, the title works almost like a gravitational field—it keeps pulling different images and gestures into its orbit. The title becomes a prism: falling as violence, as memory, as surrender, as descent into grief, but also as the very motion that allows renewal. It’s less a single “theory” than a set of possibilities the poem keeps testing.

EF: Are there any journals or magazines you’re currently enjoying?

YYY: I’m really enjoying the Nowhere Girl Collective and Frontier Poetry. They’re both great places to read contemporary poetry and they spotlight both up-and-coming and established writers.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

YYY: I really enjoyed Yan Zhang’s “Ars Poetica” and Bethany Schultz Hurst's “Letter to Geppetto, Written on the Back of a Red Lobster Menu.” What struck me in reading these two poems together is how both are wrestling with containment and collapse, though they approach it differently. “Letter to Geppetto” filters that experience through cultural ruin, finding a strange home in the belly of the whale, the mall, the failing Red Lobster—while the street poem is more rooted in close perception, watching how sunlight, dumpsters, and cicadas slip in and out of memory. One leans toward allegory, the other toward meditation, but both ask the same question: how do we live meaningfully inside wreckage, and what does it take to translate the fleeting or the broken into something that lasts?

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Yishak Yohannes Yebio was the 2024 Youth Poet Laureate of Washington D.C. and the Arts and Social Justice Fellow at the Strathmore and Wooly Mammoth Theatre. His work has been featured or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Nowhere Girl Collective, Inflectionist Review, Delta Poetry Review and elsewhere.