In this conversation for Tupelo Quarterly, I had the profound honor of speaking with poet and educator Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, whose collection Cowboy Park, winner of the 2024 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and 2025 Lammy Award in LGBTQ+ Finalist, Poetry, explores language, grief, queerness, and memory with a searing and tender gaze. We spoke about growing up in El Paso, the role of code-switching, navigating trauma in poetry, and what it means to write stories that have never been given warnings. Eduardo’s work is a living, breathing resistance—each line a refusal to be erased, each poem a quiet prayer toward healing. What follows is a conversation about naming pain, refusing italics, and reclaiming what was once silenced.
Darius Phelps: Thank you so much for being here. I’d love to open with “I Was Only a Boy.” It’s a powerful piece that sets the tone for so much in Cowboy Park. Would you mind starting us off with that one?
Eduardo Martínez-Leyva: Of course.
Phelps: Thank you. I don’t think I’d ever heard you read that one out loud—it’s arresting on the page, but spoken, it carries a new weight.
Eduardo-Martinez-Leyva-Poem-1EML: I don’t read it often. It kind of gets neglected, to be honest. But it’s funny—parts of it were inspired by something as unexpected as Family Matters. You know Judy Winslow? The character who went upstairs and never came back down? That disappearance always stayed with me—this quiet vanishing, particularly of a Black girl character. I kept thinking about erasure, invisibility, how folks of color can become disposable in pop culture and in life. That sentiment shaped this poem. There’s no “very special episode” for us. No laugh track. That line lived with me.
DP: That metaphor cuts deep. I was actually named after Eddie Winslow—my mom loved that show. And I remember watching it with my grandmother. You’re right—it’s something we don’t talk about enough, how certain characters, especially on Black and Brown shows, just disappear.
EML: Exactly. And it often mirrors how we’re made to feel—expendable or invisible. And as a queer person of color, there were times I wanted to be seen, and other times I needed to be invisible. That tension—the longing and the hiding—it’s all in the work.
DP: That’s one of the most haunting elements of Cowboy Park—the way tenderness and trauma co-exist. I wanted to ask: how do you decide what to reveal and what to withhold in your poetry?
EML: I still struggle with that. Much of Cowboy Park is autobiographical, but I use composite figures—like Angelo, who started as a stand-in for my brother who was deported. Over time, Angelo became a blend of all the boys I grew up with. That gave me distance. It gave me permission to lean into the stories.
There’s also the question of trigger warnings. I had a friend once say, “You didn’t give me any warnings before I read this,” and I realized—I didn’t even think about it. Because for me, that world was normal. There were no warnings in real life. And I think about that often when I teach. Should we prepare our students for something life never prepares us for?
DP: That really hit me. There’s something about growing up BIPOC where you just know the difference between a firecracker and a gunshot. It’s not taught—it’s inherited, for survival. And no one warns you about that. You just learn.
EML: Yes! It’s like we have to pass down survival knowledge—how to navigate profiling, police, grief. It’s generational, but it’s also so individual. And when something traumatic happens, like my mom surviving a mass shooting in 2019, I didn’t know how—or if—I could write about it. It wasn’t “my” story. But eventually, I realized I was a part of it too. So I had to find a way.
DP: That echoes something you wrote in “Portrait of the Speaker Inside a Burning House.” Would you be open to reading that one?
Eduardo-Martinez-Leyva-Poem-2EML: Of course. I wrote it during a retreat in a dune shack in Provincetown. No electricity, no distractions. Just me, the ocean, and my ghosts.
DP: That’s stunning. There’s such restraint, and yet the intensity is undeniable. Let’s talk about language and code-switching—how do those choices function in your work?
EML: I used to feel like I had to compartmentalize—Spanish at home, English in public. My mom insisted we never mix the two. But eventually I thought: Why? Why can others write in French or German and not get questioned? But when I wrote three lines in Spanish, someone in my MFA workshop said they felt “alienated.” That was eye-opening.
Now, I see code-switching as both defiance and intimacy. Refusing to italicize Spanish is intentional. Why should my language be “othered”? If it alienates, so be it. The poems are meant to resonate with the people who see themselves in them. That’s enough.
DP: That’s powerful. That refusal—to explain or translate—is its own form of reclamation. Before we close, I’d love to ask: what legacy do you hope to leave behind through your poetry?
EML: I hope my work shows that stories like mine—Brown, queer, border-dwelling, fractured—are worth telling. I want to leave behind a body of work that doesn’t flinch, that holds complexity. And maybe help someone else say, “Me too,” even if they never say it out loud. That’s enough. That’s everything.
Darius Phelps is a poet, educator, and scholar whose work explores grief, identity, and liberation through poetic inquiry. He is a Poetry Co-Editor at Matter, Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and the author of the forthcoming My God’s Been Silent.
Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, born in El Paso, TX, to Mexican immigrants, is the author of Cowboy Park, winner of the 2024 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Adroit Journal, Narrative Magazine, The Slowdown, The Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, The Frost Place, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Lambda Literary, and Columbia University, where he earned hisMFA. He was a 2024 Get the Word Out publicity incubator participant with Poets & Writers and has served as writer-in-residence at St. Albans School for Boys in Washington, D.C.