SinglePage

Recently, I had the great honour of being featured as part of the Chicago Artists’ Resource SinglePage series. I talk about how hard it was to return to poetry after my daughter was born. An excerpt:

When my daughter was born, I remembered words I had forgotten: sunqu, wawa, uripachallay. They poured out of me, bits of Quechua mixed with English and Spanish to form a strange litany of endearments I repeated again and again as I carefully traced the contours of her face, claiming for her every name,  every devotional, I could think of: mi amor, mi chula,mi nena, mi wawa, mi beba, my basket, my bean, my bundle, my love, my heart, mi sunqu, micorazón, uripachallay, palomita, little dove. When I ran out of words, I’d simply tell her I loved her, chanting: te quiero mucho mucho mucho, tanto tanto tanto, siempresiempre siempre. In the absence of any new thing to say about how much I loved my daughter, I became a kind of trilingual thesaurus…

Catch the rest of this essay, plus a video of me reading my poem, on Chicago Artist Resource.