Could you tell us a bit about the context poem and your inspiration for writing it?

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If I remember correctly (as it’s been some time since I initially wrote the poem, a lot of its origin is clouded) I wrote it in the summer of 2023, which was frankly an awful time for all involved. Everyone in my friend group was broke and jobless after our first year of college, I had just come out of a month(s)-long psychotic breakdown brought about by spiralling into paranoia about climate change, and everyone was in an awful state. We were all getting high almost every day, to the point a few of my friends would just fall apart if they didn’t smoke weed for a week or something, just anger and nightmares and panics – and I, the worst, cause even when I was smoking, I was paranoid. I kept trying to find a job just to keep my time occupied, tried to do something – as hyperbolic as it seems, coming home after my first year of college felt like returning from a war. I struggled adjusting to my day-to-day life. And of course, the background to all these group neuroses, all our problems is this ever present, choking heat, and the fact there’s just very little to do in North Florida besides go to shitty malls, go to gas stations late at night, or stay inside. 

 

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What is your personal connection to Florida? Is there something beyond your own experience that Florida represents or speaks to as a literary device in the poem? 

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I’ve lived in Florida my entire life, and I’ve just watched what I feel like an ever-present decline. It’s gotten hotter, it’s definitely gotten hotter. I remember at one brief point as a four-year-old there was snow, tiny little angels that immediately melted on the sidewalk and could barely be considered flakes, but there was snow. Every winter feels weaker and weaker. As some may be aware, our governor is a wannabe Donald Trump, who recently tried to auction off our state parks to pickleball courts and hotel developers. The nature dies, the beach water feels warmer, and it all just feels worse. My favourite spots (mainly bookstores and tabletop game stores where I spent much money and time as youth) have all closed, especially in COVID. A lot of my friends have left for better things. If Florida is a particular literary device in this writing, I’d say it exists solely as one large metaphor for decline. 

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The poem uses vivid imagery reflective of a sense of entrapment – the heat, the violence, police presence, downward spirals, etc. Given that it features in our issue on Homeliness, can you reflect on how these elements of the poem might speak to, or push against the drive to create a sense of place, or home?

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I have never felt at home in Florida, although as I’ve mentioned it has been my home my entire life. It feels like one massive heat trap here, that one day I’ll wake up burnt alive, or drowned in my own humid sweat. We are encircled on all sides by land developers, police, reactionary government at all levels, golfers, and the sort of rich person who likes to build their house as close to the beach as possible. Year after year I’ve watched my friends be demonized by our politicians for the crime of trying to change their body or to love who they love, as trite as that might sound, and I’m sick of it. Try as I might to stick down roots, there is no fertile soil here to dwell in. Should I have the fortune of marrying, starting a family – I’m going up to Maine, or Michigan, probably among countless others who can no longer tolerate hurricane after hurricane, 90-degree winters, and the like. Despite my best attempts to dissuade them, my mother and father bought a house here recently after almost a decade and a half of renting following the 2008 crash, and oftentimes I am haunted by the seemingly unavoidable fact that they will die here, of heat stroke, drowning, lack of water or food, or any other number of nightmarish ways. There is nothing I can do to convince them otherwise, and if I ever get out of here, I will live with the guilt I could not take them with me.

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What do you hope readers will take away from this poem and how does it speak to the possibility of an Otherwise?

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I hope readers take away from this the unending dread that lives in some of the US, the malice that seems to leak out of every part of the air your breath and the water you drink, of every golfing suburb you pass by driving, every time one of our cops beats someone to death and you feel that choking sensation that you are entirely powerless, choked out by heat, dreaming at night of a world without these evils. Part of it is paranoia, part of it is the utter evil that is the American project.

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​I feel that this great evil has been hammered home even more effectively by recent happenings. We are a nation of doddering fools who will burn the entire world to maintain comfortable suburbs. Already, developers seem to encroach on the as yet untouched forests in my areas like buzzards to a corpse, excited by potential decisions on environmental matters. Hell is empty, all the demons are here, and they are all infinitely more powerful than me or anyone else I know. I have the feeling next summer will be a very warm one.