Dear Erin, I’ve been thinking about what I would add to the list and I realized that being alone in my head and cut off from community begs for epistolary. The thing about anxiety is how it perches in the throat and then feels like a cobweb, the way it mimics symptoms of infectious diseases. It’s not a bird with feathers that perches in the soul—it’s a poacher that waits for the perfect target.
Dear Danielle, Your chapbook is blowing me away. I am so grateful for your existence and your words and the digital cosmos that tangled our paths. I am reading you every day and finding new winged things that taste of freedom.
Dear editors and staff of journals who nominated me for Pushcarts this year, you make every single rejection bearable. There will never be a way to thank you enough for believing in my writing or my words or my voice or whatever is believable about this girl who sometimes hardly believes herself and the fact of her own existence.
Dear Pidgeonholes Team, Thank you for working tirelessly to promote and support and publish writers. Thank you for all the things I have learned (and keep learning) about the challenges of editing a literary magazine, and the multiple balancing acts and considerations that go into decisions. Thank you for inspiring me and teaching me and letting me be a part of something beautiful that I value deeply.
Dear Robert Musil, I am still fascinated by you. I’m not sure you deserve this by which I mean time is so fleeting and you have a way of destroying it with your sentence structure—not to mention ethics entering every single reading decision of the pandemic-shortened daze. But living in the US and knowing how easy It is to reject complicity for our actions in the rest of the world, I feel I still need to read you in every possible translation of avoidance.
Dear Cockroach Who Saw Me Naked This Morning, I am so glad you were there. I am so glad we got to share that moment of silence and slight disgust together. I know where you hid and I won’t tell a soul.
Dear Noemi Press, I am so glad I got a subscription to your books this year. As a result, my poetics has been rocked, rattled, and reshaped by the incredible writers you publish. I needed that. I am still crawling through the aftermath.
Dear Louie, thank you for being a light in small tunnels.
Dear Rosebud Ben-Oni, thank you for curating and crowdsourcing such an incredible list of poetry publications for the Kenyon Review blog. This resource is a consistent trove of books that we can return to and read and share and support and it’s the best of literary community in action.
Dear Lana, I love your novel. And I understand how challenging it can be to make a choice under social pressure, especially when you know life is tenuous and every year might be the last and you are alone (so alone) in that knowledge and timbre.
Dear Random Sample Review team and poetry submitters, thank you for your patience as I learn to navigate a new system. Learning takes time. Learning takes patience. I am deeply humbled by (and grateful for) yours.
Dear Facebook, thanks for being a great place to share photos with family across the country and world until Trump won the election in 2016. Thanks for helping Trump win the election in 2016. Thanks for keeping many nice retirees in my life on a level of reality that wouldn’t be legal if it were a drug. Thanks for being a great space for humans to attack each other under the auspices of personal offense when I post something related to racism or xenophobia or homophobia in the South. Thanks for really enabling that level of hurt.
Dear Facebook, I’m not done. Thank you also for how you’ve cornered the market as a vector for the evil eye. Thank you for excelling in lo-fi judgmental nonsense. No one ever likes the articles or the poems I post—my audience tends to like 1) the photos of family or 2) the posts where people get into fights over how much racism is actually racism and the only people arguing are white.
Dear fellow rape survivors, it’s strange how random life can be. It’s strange how none of us deserve it and yet some of us have been taught to believe that we do. I re-vision my desire for revenge daily. I have to remember that my rape was not the only thing that ever happened in the world, even though it felt that way to me. I have to balance my belief in justice and carceral reform against the parts that want blood and vengeance. Surviving rape is like waking up and realizing that every single man around you is a threat, and every single friendly conversation is the interlude to violence. There is no safe space. There will never be another safe space. Surviving, for me, means knowing that rapists are everywhere in a culture that glorifies rape. The culture work is my revenge. It is also my only hope for justice. Patriarchy is at its most effective in its constructions of feminism as a reaction to men. I am not interested in visions that limit me to reacting and punishing—I am interested in visions that dethrone the male gaze and divest from masculinist models of violence. It is possible to believe that rape is horrible and prisons are also crimes.
Dear rapists, I see you. I see your smiling wives, your family portraits, your daughters playing softball. And I look forward to the day when our justice system includes a reparative component that focuses on making restoration and putting you in classrooms where you will spend parts of your week (every week) talking to young people about rape. We don’t have enough prisons for all of you. And we never will. I I’m ready for tools that don’t build the master’s house.
Dear COVID-19, I know that you don’t give a damn but I thought I’d mention anyway how much I despise you. Just to be clear. I despise you even more than I despise Donald Trump, and that may be ontologically useless but it helps me to say it aloud anyway. Fuck off, COVID-19.
Dear friends and fellow writers, it is a cruel time for new books. It is a hard time for those juggling childcare with working from home. It is a terrifying time for those with spouses or loved ones working on the front lines of the pandemic. It is a time of rampant nativism and xenophobia justified for historical reasons, and this applies to the literary community as well as the world at large. It is a haunting—and haunted—time. It is scary. It is scary in its repetitions and new rhythms of disappointment. every day I wake up and every day I crawl into bed after telling my children it is not as scary as it seems. It is a time when I need all the things Rebecca Solnit said about humans in times of trouble to be true. But I don’t know… I just don’t… I’ve always been accused of over-hoping and keeping my head in the clouds. Mammals look better in lyric.
Dear landfills, forgive me for the insane amount of trash I’ve been producing lately. There is no alternative. This is because we refuse to see one.
Dear mountains, I miss your wildflowers, your vistas, your interior-softening hardness.
Dear Mom, you’d never believe the shit that’s been happening since you left.
Dear panic, I hear you. Constantly. Daily. Every time I make a list for my family or try to start the letters I wish Mom had written before she died suddenly. Every inch of quiet between sirens in this crowded city. Every other breath.
Dear epistolary, I can’t remember why I started writing this but the azaleas have lit the street and the sun goes about her business as usual and more than anything anything anything I hope you give us a chance to do that.