SmokeLong Quarterly

Your essay features a powerful through line featuring things that are stuck or ensnared, including “a flood roaring underneath a sheet of ice,” “words … trapped in a snow globe,” and even a “ghost … trying to be granted passage to heaven.” To what extent is the narrator speaking from a place of confinement?

Yeah, that’s a good observation! This piece is definitely concerned with avoidance and, by contrast, facing difficult emotional realities. I aimed for an image-language moving between legible and incomprehensible, images that seem somewhat obvious on their face but also seem to shy away from saying what needs to be said. But also, as poets, we’re always attracted to bivalent images. Those lines could also be read as showing motion or striving, right? I’m interested in speakers/voices who don’t fully understand what’s going on but are willing to invite us on a journey to throw out a bunch of images to try and figure it out.

Near the end of the essay, the narrator ponders an array of threatening men, insisting that with each one, they “know what he’s probably about to do.” What does this repetition imply about the relationship between these dangers?

The phrases repeated verbatim in this passage make up the loudest “character,” certainly. (I had a beloved music professor who always referred to motifs as “characters,” which meant viewing them not as personal creative choices but rather living things who had to be given a purpose, a motivation to go somewhere. It’s a framework I find useful for writing technique, as well, even beyond literal story characters.) So, yes, the “character” of repetition highlights the tension of the piece, but looking at writing this way also leads me to ask: What other “characters” exist here? When I view the piece through that lens, I feel like there are lots of images of danger or fear or defensiveness elsewhere and lots of other forms of repetition in language and ideas. More than explaining the dangers of that section, this question makes me want to go back through the piece and consider what “minor characters” have been contributing to these themes all along, who’s been setting the scene for the reader to encounter these threats by the time the climactic passage brings them to center stage and makes them unavoidable.

Yet another prominent theme involves failures of communication, from misunderstandings (“you were not what this song was about”) to coercion (“no really let it all release”) to the potential meaninglessness of language itself. Is this a topic that you regularly explore in your writing?

Totally. You know, I come to writing from the world of music. And when you’re handed a score, you’re being handed a set of instructions that require performers’ individual contributions to bring them to life, that have to risk mis- or re-interpretation to take the piece from ink on a page to a real piece of music. We don’t often talk about writing in the same way, but it’s interesting to think about: Why shouldn’t we consider the reader’s response as part of the piece? It better reflects what language and communication really do in the real world to consider reader reaction in this way. I’m generally less interested in work that just asks me to understand the meaning of words: I want the words do something, to feel like something. I want the words to require me to do something.

The scope of this essay is especially impressive, considering it’s a work of flash nonfiction that balances specific incidents with deep reflection. In what ways does compressing one’s experiences into such an abbreviated form produce unique explorations of the subject matter?

That’s a really nice thing to say! And it’s funny you say that, because this piece comes from my full-length poetry/performance project, Suite for Hallucinated Voices, which is being released by Half Mystic Press in Fall 2026. In its original context, “Grave” is actually the longest piece by far: It takes two or three times as long to perform live as any of the others. I like writing longer-form essays too, but for this project, I enjoy the shorter form because it kind of gives you nowhere to hide. This isn’t a new or radical observation on form, of course, but there’s not much time you can spend building up to an idea or realization in a shorter piece. It comes back to the “character” idea: You have no time to include any characters who aren’t serving a purpose or going somewhere. In revision, shorter pieces make you ask not just which ideas matter to the overall topic, but which ideas actually help push those characters to their conclusion.

Finally, what served as the primary inspiration for the lyric style you employ in this essay?

Even my longest essays often start as poems that simply grow out of their original containers. But this piece was the opposite: I was just writing observations on music and performance, trying to figure out why the ideas seemed relevant to me at all. It became clear, though, that I wasn’t really accessing my true thoughts or feelings. I typically turn to lyricism when there’s a gap between what I understand logically and what I’m feeling, when the truth exists somewhere beyond what straightforward facts would reveal. Back to the first question, lyricism always weirdly makes me feel more exposed than stating a thought directly: Like it requires inviting the reader into my dreams, where they can make their own judgments rather than hearing my own editorialized interpretation. But it feels better to ask readers to sit and look at these images with me as we try to figure out why they matter rather than even trying to figure out what they mean.