by Paige Welsh
I interviewed Lyd Havens in the summer of 2021 when we were all flirting with the idea of returning to a more normal life. People were still clamoring to get shots, and there was talk of abandoning masks by Thanksgiving. I even saw a movie in theaters. Then the delta variant took off, and the timeline for “normal” stretched indefinitely. At the time of this writing, literal fires are consuming Lake Tahoe. I live south of Los Angeles, but my computer has decided to start reporting my area’s AQI on the bottom right of my monitor. There’s a metric for the damage climate change will do to my lungs, so I will learn to think in terms of damage done as opposed to escaping. It’s in this context that I find myself revisiting the titular poem in Havens' poetry collection Chokecherry.
“to get a new inhaler. The nurse asks if I’m a smoker. No,
but my parents are. No, but my best friends are.
No, but when I was a kid we almost lost our house
in a wildfire. No, but choking to death seems to run
in the family. Sometimes I wake up gasping for air”
Havens speaks with startling prescience to our moment. We are watching an era that was sown centuries ago unfold in fire and smoke. We did not choose to inherit the chain of events that led us to this point, but it is ours nonetheless. It will take an unmaking to reassemble ourselves, and that’s where Havens has practice. In poems like Chokecherry, they take a gasp of air before it all comes tumbling out with an urgency marked in lines that break before a thought finishes. We are hardly through the middle when the next trauma flashes across the page, but it all must come out. The reader joins Havens on sprints through long, ambitious poems like “Boomtown” but finds respite in islands of the past worth keeping. A lens of queerness softens boundaries to reorient our vision from interior discovery to what can be. In Chokecherry, we may find practice imagining as we remember. I explore these themes and more in our conversation.
Paige Welsh: There are a lot of parts of this collection that resonated with me, and as I was preparing for this interview, I found myself tempted again and again to ask you questions as if you, Lyd, are the speaker of the poems. So before we begin, who is the speaker in this collection to you?
Lyd Havens: I think it was Lucie Brock-Broido who said, “Fuck ‘the speaker.’ It is I.” And it is me. Like you said, memory is unsteady so there are things I got wrong or gaps I have to fill in, but the speaker is me. The first line of “XX” is “I was twenty years old at a long glass table writing the same letter for a year,” and the long glass table is my parents’ dining room table.
PW: Chokecherry contains confessional poetry. Does “confession” feel like the right word for what you’re doing?
LH: In some ways, yes—some ways, no. There’s a poem in Chokecherry where I outright say that I hate my father. When I wrote this book and it was accepted for publication, I had to come to terms with how people who know him are probably going to read this. Some of them are strangers. Some of them are people I know, but it had to stay. In that sense, it was a confession.
On the other hand, I don’t know what I would call this book other than one long recollection that I had to get out. Memory was always important to me because there was a period in my life where mine was just shot. It was a trauma response—my brain was repressing memories for my own sake.
Then two and a half years ago, my grandmother started showing signs of dementia. She would ask, “Have you seen your grandfather?” and my grandfather had been dead for six months at that point. Then she started asking, “I haven’t heard from David in a while?” David is her son, and he has been dead for twelve and a half years.
My memory loss was my body protecting me, and then juxtapose that to my grandmother, for whom losing her faculties was her worst fear. I wanted to honor that. Does that even answer your question?
PW: It does. I ask because I feel like the word “confession” is loaded. It has the Catholic sense of confession, where you list out your crimes. There’s the relief, but what is confessed is often things you don’t need to apologize for. I feel tension with titling the genre “confessional” for that reason.
LH: Yeah, I almost want it to be “anti-confession.” When I first started working on this book it was going to be about being born into violence and how you move past that. At that time of writing the first drafts of Chokecherry, I had just lost my grandfather. He was probably the best man who’s ever lived, at least the best one I have ever known. But then when my grandmother got sick, and I was working on Chokecherry as a way to distract myself in the middle of the pandemic.
At that time, Arizona was probably having the worst outbreak in the US. While my mother and step-father were taking care of my grandmother, I was here at their house, taking care of my sister. I needed a distraction, so I threw myself into this manuscript. It was pretty much done by the time she died. When I say I wrote this out of necessity, I mean it.
PW: The poem “Elegy Ending my Grandmother Remembering” was my favorite.
LH: That poem is the first poem I ever wrote acknowledging my grandmother was in that state. It was necessary but so hard. When it got published, I was so excited that The Shallow Ends wanted to publish it, but I remember thinking, Would she hate me for this? For showing her like this? I showed all the drafts to my mom and asked, “Mom, if I send this, will you hate me?” She said, “No, and I think she’d be okay with it. She’s always been okay with you writing your truth.”
The day it was published, I was the caregiver for her. I woke up in her house, and I remember sitting there, looking at it, and there she was, too. I can’t even describe the feeling. I felt guilty, but also a deep love for her.
PW: I also find the form of this poem so perfect for describing someone going through dementia. I didn’t know about Markov sonnets until reading this.
LH: George Abraham invented the form. Their Markov sonnet, “Ekphrasis With Toothing Chainsaw in Unnamed Halhul Vineyard,” is in Poetry, and they said, “Please, if you want to write a Markov sonnet, do.” So I sent “Elegy Ending in my Grandmother Remembering” to them, and they said they loved it! Abraham said something in an interview about how at its truest form, the form is about history repeating itself, and I saw within that my grandmother’s history repeating itself every day.
PW: That poem comes around the middle. How did you go about ordering the collection?
LH: I wanted to break a mold I had made for myself where I do all the sad stuff first and then all the happy. I wanted it to be more like life. You go through a hard time, and there are respites of happiness, and then there’s a really long stretch of happiness with bumps. I didn’t want to write a book where all the horrible things happen to me, and then there is the happy stuff at the end.
PW: You lived a few different places, but there is this cohesive sense of space in Chokecherry. I see that most in “Boomtown.” I think it comes together with a cohesive set of aesthetics, the sour flavors of the vinegar town, the chokecherries themselves, recuring shades of the pinks and reds. It’s like you’ve created this meta-space that spans Idaho to Arizona. What is this place to you? Is it possible to map home to it considering the history?
LH: I made this sort of geography in my head that melted desert, oasis, and mountains. I carry that with me everywhere. Before the pandemic, I felt I was in-between homes. I would come home to Arizona for Thanksgiving, and then I would go back home to Boise. Despite having to endure extreme loss during the pandemic, my family and I have been so lucky even to have a house, to still have income, to like each other enough not to kill each other.
But it’s also a house where I have endured a lot. I wake up in the same bed every morning where I found out that both of my grandparents have died. I have a closet where I used to sit and argue with my dad on the phone. It feels extreme to say, but this house is kind of poisonous to me. There’s too much trauma. I love my family so dearly, but as I get closer to leaving, I can’t wait. I can’t wait to see what home is going to look like when you leave.
PW: It's interesting that you mention in-betweeness. You have the geographical in-betweeness, but also the experience of queerness where you are blending the boundaries between gender, sexuality. For context, every month or so I wake up in the night and consider switching to they/them pronouns, and then I don’t get around to it because it seems like so much work.
LH: (laughs) I understand completely.
PW: The trouble I’ve had when considering what a non-binary identity is whether non-binary is a place with its own borders or is it a commitment to living in the blurriness?
LH: I wonder if it’s both. It is simultaneously beautiful and frustrating that being nonbinary means something different to everybody. It makes it so hard for cisgender people to understand. In 2015 I thought, Coming out as non-binary sounds like too much work, I have more pressing issues right now. Then I moved to Boise. I found community, and I was like, You know what? Yeah. I think somebody who thinks about it this much probably is nonbinary.
At the same time, I had a hard time being non-binary in school. A couple years ago I had a classmate who I think googled me and found one of the poems I had written about being nonbinary. He sent me aggressive messages on Facebook that said, “You can’t be nonbinary because you look like a woman,” and I was terrified.
For the longest time I used they/them exclusively, but after that I wanted to do they/them or she/her. I’m sure some people will think it’s cowardly, but it’s almost like a comfort blanket. The fact that it was a classmate in a poetry workshop, who I had built a relationship with: it was all kinds of trust being built and then thrown out the window.
During this pandemic, I haven’t really thought about it. I’m not being perceived, and I’m pretty sure my dog doesn’t give a shit. I’ve been thinking as I prepare to go back, Am I just going to have another moment where my gender or my lack thereof is blossoming?
PW: I thought you got at something that felt so correct in the poem “I only misgender myself when Fleetwood Mac comes on.” Even when you do transition, you end up with these memories and experiences from whatever you were assigned at birth. Even if non-binary feels more true, I do feel a kinship, an alliance, with women because I’m experiencing misogyny.
LH: Exactly. And I’m not gonna lie, that’s probably the scariest poem I’ve written in my life. I remember getting it published before Chokecherry and wondering, “Can I even talk about this?” Not only is this about being non-binary, it’s about my dad. I outright say, “I hate my dad.” I was scared shitless, but you know what? As they say, I have to live my truth. It ended up being the poem people bring up the most, still.
Whenever I give readings, I read it. There’s something powerful about having as much rage as I did then. I also feel this kinship with women, especially because I was raised by a lot of very strong women. Besides it being a comfort of sorts, a shield, using she/her pronouns was almost involuntary homage?
PW: There’s this tension in being your family’s child, but sometimes the people who call you their child haven’t earned their right to say that. I think sometimes for gender fluid people, making the affordance of she/her pronouns for a loving parent can be a generosity if that makes sense?
LH: Yeah. I totally understand that. I was just thinking that as I was estranged from my dad is we have the same last name. I don’t want to be associated with this man who caused so much violence and anger for my family. I’ve had nightmares about my dad almost every night this last week, but I’ve realized just because we share a name doesn’t mean it isn’t my last name. Frankly, I like my last name. I’ve decided it’s mine. I have a family, but I am a free agent. I’ve wanted to reclaim she/her, but in the process of this book, I realized I also wanted to reclaim my last name, too.
PW: There’s also much poetic power in a last name like “Havens.”
LH: Yeah! I want to give it a new meaning because my dad was the opposite of a haven. I try every day to be a haven. It’s a lovely last name, and it can mean a lot when it’s attached to the right person.
About the Author
Paige Welsh is a dual English MA and MFA candidate at Chapman University. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Bear Review, and other outlets. She has also written reviews for Tinderbox Poetry Journal, the LA Review of Books. When she’s not writing, she likes to garden.
