It is a thrill to be published in a journal like Pleiades, which is full of people I admire greatly! It was also cool to by in Issue 39.2, which includes a folio of Afro-Caribbean literature, which is especially interesting to me because my children are half Jamaican.

This particular poem is greatly influenced by the work of poet Diane Seuss, who has written a lot about the place she comes from in rural Michigan, just North of where I grew up (in South Bend). I appreciate her descriptiveness, her care and attention, as well as her subversiveness. She elevates a landscape that is not supposed to be valued as art, and in doing so, she gives me permission to also elevate and explore my own landscape. I spent quite a bit of time in the area that she is from, and her poetry resonates strongly with me.