Lourdes Figueroa was born in Yuba City, California, during a trip her parents made from Mexico to the USA when they worked in the campo tilling the soil. Her work is rooted in migration, what her family lived when they moved to this country. In 2009 and 2011 she attended VONA. In 2012 she completed an MFA with a focus in poetry at USF. Her work has been published in Jack Hirschman’s Poets 11 2008 & 2010, Generations, Eleven Eleven, Something Worth Revising and BACKWORDS Press. She currently works and lives in San Francisco with her wife. yolotl was her first chapbook, published by Spooky Actions. Her chapbook Ruidos=To Learn Speak, written during her Alley Cat Residency, is forthcoming.

Why poetry? What pulls you into the page? What poets first inspired you and who do you return to?

poetry, somehow it found me, or we just crashed into each other, I spent a lot time in the library growing up, specifically when my apá was violent, it was a place of refuge for my amá, she constantly read, she constantly read to us, I read a lot of fiction and still do, but one of the first poets that I stumbled upon was Emily Dickinson, I didn’t quite understand her then, mouthing her English at the time, I was about 11 years old, and in school it was Edgar Allen Poe when I was in 7th grade, I have a very vivid memory of my teacher putting on a record player and having the class put their head down on their desks and I did, I closed my eyes and suddenly there was the story the tell-tale heart, and I am grateful for this, I tear up remembering this, I think it was reading and my amá’s constant love of reading that saved us, at least has kept our hearts and minds this far, and the poets that gave me the language to articulate and write what my experience living what we had lived was Gloria Anzaldúa and Ana Castillo, they continue to do so, and outside of books because the poem exists in sound and story orally the first poets were really my amá and my abuelita chona, their stories nurtured my mind, my heart, and my conception of love

and it is important to note, the poets around me here in San Francisco and the Bay Area, I read everyone I can, and we all should, we are part of a thread that blooms like veins, I feel very lucky to have access to different forms of the word and how it is being passed from person to person, zines, chapbooks, open mics, film, local presses… none of us exist in a vacuum and none of us come into our poetics in a vacuum

the poets that I keep reaching for, or find myself packing into my backpack right now are Rosario Castellanos, Norma Cole, June Jordan, Kim Shuck, I’ve been carrying around Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian’s Writers Who Love Too Much which somehow weaves itself with some of Alfred Arteaga’s Chicano Poetics, and This Bridge Called My Back edited and put together by Cherríe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa, they all bring the poem back to the body, I have to say we are not an assembly of voices, but thread, threads being weaved into each other, I keep reading Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, García Lorca, Kamau Brathwaite, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and more

but the most powerful of voices that are always in my ear are my familia, my amá, my wife, my hermana y mis hermanos, the memories of my abuelita chona smoking her cigarettes and telling stories of her childhood while she planted her flowers and attended to her small garden of roses, tulipanes, mint, manzanillo, oregano, and a small peach tree

What space does/should poetry occupy right now?

the poem is a vessel that articulates our insides, the act of using the word to invoke what is inside and vice versa to bring the outer to the inside, it is revolution in every way, the poem revolts, the poem turns, the poem shatters language, the poem too takes the language of your insides, of your own particular mouth and uses those fragments to further connect us in some way, bringing each other into each other, the poem is everything and nothing with the human breath, the poem is meant to be broken in every way, the body collapses the poem so the poem can be in the body and the body can be in the poem, we need it, we have always needed it since we learned to song with each other, it is more ancient than we realize, existing in its’ own way in different languages, terrifying and beautiful, asking what’s this, what’s life, which one is this one? I am another yourself/ In Lak’ech

Name some poets you’re really excited about right now. Who do you have on your shelf/in your ear/on your mind?

the poets to be on the lookout for are each other, with my whole heart I believe in each other, we must read each other, elevate each other’s voices, support each other, never apologize for our sound, no one sound is the one, we must embrace each other’s sound, read widely with intention or with pleasure or with love or with pain, but read

Breath is the first word that comes to my mind when I think of your work. When I read your poetry, it has such a beautiful, hypnotic quality, and I always feel like I’m returning to the deepest level of being. How do you inhabit your poet self? What is your work’s center right now?

my works’ center continues to be the gut, the lung, the throat, el corazón, the communal, we are meant to sing in some form, all of us, everything is made this way, it is the nature of this reality, as we love whatever it is, love whomever it is, we are in movement, we are in creation with each other, in constant revelation with each other, this is duende, this is how the sun loves us

What projects have you been involved with recently, and what do you have planned?

Current projects I’m involved in are: I’m in the heart of putting together my second chapbook, Ruidos = To Learn Speak, that I am doing with the Alley Cats Residency here in San Francisco. I am putting together my first poetry workshop that I will launch in January with South of Market Community Action Network, this workshop will seek to create a safe space for the voices of our LGBTQA immigrant community and will be in the heart of the South of Market. Too, I’m about to embark on my second film script, a short film in collaboration with my wife, a story of immigration

What advice do or would you give to a writer just starting out?

I was recently told by a therapist that I have PTSD, no one diagnosis will do, there are layers of trauma that I had no idea how it was affecting my mind, and coping/survival mechanisms I am working through to identify, things that I had refused to name my body names, the poem helps me articulate some of the pain, the body has a way of holding trauma so it can survive, and so does the mind, my memory drops, I drop things, sometimes Peggy will tell me a story about something that happened and I can’t recall anything,

I articulate from a queer brown mouth, a descendant of colonization, from a severely bruised body that refuses to forget her trauma until it is said in some form, a survivor of rape, a survivor of molestation, these things are not me, but things that I lived, these things are a human experience, and all these things are deserving of literature, of poem, of song, this is how we recognize each other…if I were to come across my childhood self, I would hug her and hold her and read to her like my amá did, and take her to the library, and tell her ‘keep going to the library, continue to be kind in all aspects’ to everyone

You can read Lourdes Figueroa’s work in the sixth issue of Night Music Journal, which will be released November 18th.