VI KHI NAO: What do you think is the purpose of poetry in this world?
SOPHIA DAHLIN: ******
VKN: If your mother were a food-source, what kind of vegetable, fruit, or planet would she be? I get the sense that your mother’s love for you and your siblings is wet, like an overripe banana. I think what distinguishes you from me is how tall you are and you use a handkerchief, which isn’t to say that fabric isn’t natural or how you are measured in this world can’t be computed or quantified by cloth.
SD: In fact, you wizard, my mother is certainly the banana bread planet in the very center of my system. Per, my mother, made banana bread a lot when we were growing up, and she did not overmix the batter—so there would be caves of wet banana and ruts of melted chocolate chips. You and I write a lot about food and you and I talk and talk about women and sex and romance. But you Vi you stay on a food for longer than I do, you have a terrifying habit of making food into people without shaking its foodness. Your avocado has an abortion and its seed is a baby, or your pear has a seed that’s an eye, or there is that poem where you are rinsing and peeling the baby and its seeds are sperm—what makes each of these half personified foods seed so differently? So much of the power of your writing comes to me from your insistence on the physicality of things, even simultaneously of the object and of what it suggests. No part of the metaphor ghosts w/you, it is all bodied. So Vi you described yourself a few days ago as “not sensual,” but how come you know so much about fruit, Vi?
VKN: You have such a great memory, Sophie. I am incredibly hedonistic and conservatively sultry; I want to eat ice cream every second of my existence, especially butter pecan while starting a literary journal with you called Nepotism, which you have coined so cleverly and brilliantly. In Vietnamese culture, having fruits is like having dessert. I grew up next to banana and coconut trees. I used to watch my uncles scale these woody, husk trees to pluck these 32-F mammary ovoids from their tropical heights. Yesterday, while I was preparing to be a guest instructor in Caren Beilin’s class, you played Chavela Vargas’s exquisite sensual music. Her voice was so tender and provocative. What do you love about her music? And, tell me about the art of nepotism.
SD: I love Chavela Vargas’ voice helplessly. I am trying to be honest with myself about what compels me in art, so it is useful to notice myself being helplessly compelled. Vargas is such a great Aries hero-artist, such theater, gold and red breastplated sobbing. I love Vargas’ tender salty voice that lets so much horror through–her voice in Tata Dios for instance sounds just like total reverberate earth maw, you know?
Ah Nepotism, Vi, it is so hard for things to not become family. You were being facetious when you talked about not being sensual, but later you said that for a while you did not like to eat. And I know you love, love, love tasting food. And now out loud in this anarchist café I just told you how my friend told me yesterday that his housemates leave his kitchen messy and ruin his pleasure in cooking and preparing food. So instead of cooking he bought Soylent and he just “had” it. Food you just “have” not eat is very sad. So how do you stay so attentive to the taste, Vi?
VKN: ******
SD: Vi when I showed you that yummy, dreamy black and white picture of Kahlo and Vargas you fell in love with it too. Why do you love it? I love the hands. And how does that love feed your writing?
VKN: ******
VKN: I still don’t know how to answer these questions... Sophie! Will you tell me about the history of how these three poems are born? How did you conceive of them? Where were you in your life that inspired these beauties?
SD: A lake a river and a sea! But I was in love when I wrote these poems, and I was not working. At that time I wrote a lot about the mechanics of seeing, feeling, and fucking. I was writing very short lines; there were about two years when almost everything I wrote came out thin and high-pitched like freaking piccolos. “Just You & Me & Our Third Eye” and “Shell Out” I edited to make more quick and rhythmic. But when I wrote “I’m a Natural” a year later it came out whole. I didn’t change a word. And around then was the end of those poems.
I have been trying to write “from the heart” in a way that oh, age 20 I would have been so embarrassed to do. I am trying to write love poems that are native to queer bodies, the forms of queer lust that I know. Love poems about fisting. I would like to be the poet laureate of fisting. Because desire, especially when queerly directed, is the sort of compulsion I must make way for. Must allow even though I am helpless to stop it, still I have to choose it back like relaxing into water. Perhaps poetry is good for that, Vi! Matching the gut with its impulses.
A Folio of Poems by Sophia Dahlin
I’M A NATURAL
I’m going to have this
here
moment with the moon
in listening
to skimmed off light
of lake
I’ve found surfaces
of the most depth
but I think I’m who provides it
when I seal the lake
in sight
I get wet in the heart
and my eye is filling in
ripples
and a moon in me
the piercing
pussywillow
glances flat
the fish’s nose
dull black
but the water holds
me in and a moon
SHELL OUT
due to a white beach you find
me here home
dug up all stark
my armpits
cling sand
sun speaks
rude remembrance out my forehead
sun fucked sun
sky fucked sky
earth all earthfucked and the sea
too skins the shore
my personable each to each
never did suffice to make it
only a fine day
a damp dying
crust
salt and pepper in the wild meal
out of a mind
a mixture
I would like one true
oil one true
lemon or vinegar
some fingering thing
to pick the summer out the vegetable
chase the taste across the table
limp against
the uncouth radish
too radiant
colors to meet a white bed
white ceiling
red ass me between
at the sand and sea
and sun in a wet-dry
variant
heat and my home
faltered and fell inside me
when two fins slipped out
JUST YOU & ME & OUR THIRD EYE
blanching in daylight
and it swarms together
pulls apart
in buds
twitch in the overlap
where you color
and I do
so the flower shifts in place
I’d like to stream
the eye
I see
your little palm fits in me
deep
and pulls a river down
Vi Khi Nao is the author of Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018) and Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), and of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016), and the poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.