What do you write?
I’ve worked in Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Fiction, but I consider poetry my genre.
Is there an author or artist who has most profoundly influenced your work?
Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Louise Glück are three profound influences of mine. Each has an unmistakable and original voice that I admire. I also enjoy the works of Naomi Shihab Nye, Ocean Vuong, and Joy Harjo.
Why did you choose Stonecoast for your MFA?
Stonecoast was a great option for me because it was low-residency. The structure of the semesters was ideal since I was working full-time at the time. Residency was always incredible, but the asynchronous periods outside of the residency were really beneficial, since they helped me prepare for how writers actually find themselves working outside of the academic world.
What is your favorite Stonecoast memory?
I spent my last semester working with Cate Marvin, and because we were both based in Maine, we met and worked very seriously on poems together at a Chili’s in South Portland. And now we’ll always have Chili’s.
What do you hope to accomplish in the future?
For the near future, I am chasing down a full-length print collection. For the future, future? I want to see myself grow as an artist and push the boundaries of the image and the line in memorable and meaningful ways.
If you could have written one book, story, or poem that already exists, which would you choose?
There are so many good poems! But I’m not speaking hyperbolically when I say I think about
“For John, Who Begs Me Not To Enquire Further” by Anne Sexton nearly every day, so I’ll say that, because, “Not that it was beautiful / but that, in the end, there was / a certain sense of order there …” (34–35).
Sexton, Anne. “For John, Who Begs Me Not To Enquire Further.” The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1981, 34–35.
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Ǝsp!n°z@’s Mannequin
by Ruth La Croix
Take me, for instance, and what I must have known
about the aluminum spoons in the silverware drawer,
and the cut grass on the lawn weaving upon itself,
those blades interlaced like fingers on clasped hands.
I was one of four, or often five, in our warm house
without any cupboard, or a square washer to hum,
without a dryer to knead clothes like bread dough,
warm and wet. In the sitting room, where we met,
office chairs lined white walls, and blank diaries
waited to collect our thoughts, those papers empty
as our strange warm house with its quiet rooms,
each an open square as wide as a calendar page.
I arrived hypothermic, but I believed no cold could
touch either me or the false heat that kept me alive.
It isn’t possible to know how I brought myself there.
I had been living among the tombs on the other side
of the sea. I had opened myself with small stones.
It was a kind of possession until those spirits left,
when I came back to my right mind, in that room.
In a circle, we spoke about what brought us there,
the ways we played as small children, of the care
and feeding of horses, the record-keeping of tides.
We spoke in turns, warming the air with breaths,
our breaths which in turn mixed with the earthly
mystery of how we each arrived. Take Golconda,
take sweet Aurora, and lovely Rosemond. Inside
that house, they locked their names like jewels
in a squat safe, winding and unwinding its dial
until all the small numbers and scores fell away
from the circle, spinning and shimmering bright.
In our circle, they each fell away, too, their voices
were small values, quiet clicks or taps to which one
presses one’s ear to listen because meaning is there
somewhere, within a quick and irregular rhythm.
They were there with me, so what does it matter
that none of us could ever say quite how we came
to crowd the house with our obsessed presences?
In our house, a circle widened, closed, and opened
again, and under our shuffling feet the floorboards
creaked. Our cracked saucers clinked like silver
coins as we sipped from chipped cups. And sudden
gusts outside trembled the window’s lead weights
and called to something still frozen inside Salomé,
so she would swell the great blanket that enveloped
her like a frothing wave. And yet it does matter how.
In me there was legion. So how did I move? No one
could approach us outside the tombs. Was I moved?
Where does one spirit end? Or another spirit begin?
These are the questions of any physical possession.
So then how? I ask because at the end somehow
I came to sit in that warm room, that second womb,
where I would try to understand the strange cries
rising over the steep embankment of a distant sea,
on those nights as I sat there in my square chair,
my hands clasped in my lap, at special attention
resembling prayer. I ask because the way down
any road feels slower than the way back, even if
the distance doesn’t change. I ask so I can find
my own way back, even slowly, even in the dark.
And so I hold to what I wrote on one cold night:
It is so sad to sit and hear the things the boy feels.
But those are the things that brought us all here.
Small Golconda, little brother, your breath appears
here in the air. It may be a thin mist, but it is true
enough to collect in a spoon, true as a combination
to a lost lock, true as small stones the sea smooths
so soft they no longer hurt, true as an open window,
as the small square where cold and warm air collide.
“Ǝsp!n°z@’s Mannequin” is from a larger work titled Resurrection of the Mannequins. Other poems from Resurrection of the Mannequins have been published by Coffin Bell Journal and New Feathers Anthology.