I’ve never gone on a “father-son fishing trip.” Nor have I ever called anyone “Pa.” Still, this is my go at a fishing poem. I’m drawn to the idiomatic force of the “fishing trip” as a trope for intimacy, serenity, and spiritual fulfillment in nature, just as I’m drawn to the possibility of “ordinary” speech as a vehicle of familiarity and ease. Neither one is mine, though. The poem’s suggestion that one might join one’s father for an end-of-life fishing trip, speaking in cadences of folksy directness, provokes awkwardness in me. The poem, I think, wants to embrace that awkwardness, and to take the journey that it knows is unavailable to it. In literal terms, it follows a much denatured creek that rambles through the town I now live in, and it dumps out into the Lake Ontario of my childhood. Even as a full grown person, far into one’s own life, one might persist in imagining how “everything” would be different had you and Pa only taken that trip together.    Creek I suppose …

The French doors / are half open and the red curtains / writhe in the night like the last time / the director was near someone who matters, / some flood, some satellite.

I have seen a great deal of death and loss. For my own sanity and preservation I had to explore death, to understand it and craft for it a personal mythos. This poem seeks to do that, to make death more tangible not by simplifying it, but by complicating it, adding to its ethereal nature, to understand it not like something we might hold, but like something which holds (the difference between how we conceptualize a stone in our palm versus how we conceptualize wind). I don’t know why concrete fact is often seen as more comforting. The realization that we don’t know what we don’t know is a most exciting and encouraging one to me. Death could be anything we have thought of or that we have not. I want to sit with death and ask its name, but since it won’t answer I call out to the dark and let the echoes respond. I let the questions be their own answers. I inhabit wonder, and my lack of understanding becomes what I know. …

I ran an internet search on passion to help me write this introduction, and found that I’d written this poem out of my depth. Look for passion in our world and you’ll find an ancient power play with a problem for a heart. You’ll find a historical reel of attempts to define—to contain—our experience of strong and barely controllable emotion. Philosophers, poets, theologians, film directors: the effort to direct passion is, basically, erotic. You can do this at home. I love going to the movies, but as a woman of color the actual cost of admission can be difficult to predict. Certain moments in film reenact trauma borne by people with marginalized bodies, and these moments are not foreshadowed by escalating soundtrack cues so an audience member may cover her ears, her eyes, or her heart. When such moments reach through what I had hoped was a wall and grip my heart, I experience a complex of extreme feeling. I become barely controllable. I am easily terrified, and dissociating in a public space is one …

I should start with how I met him. I had seen him around several times before I wrote this poem. I would go to this bar, sometimes, and he’d be there, standing under this swarm of discotheque lights, and he liked to get drunk by the end of the evening, but I don’t judge. Anyway, there were these blots of wallpaper that if you followed along the base of the stairwell, you’d get to this red door that led out back, and you had to go through this red door if you wanted to smoke, which I did, then, sometimes. So, you really had to push down on this handle, like just punch it to get it open. I did just that, and when the door shut, there he was, standing on the other side, and I was a little embarrassed of my debut. He introduced himself, Hey, I’m Zac, and the way he said his name was both infinite and staccato, like a feeling of love and death at the same time, and he …