Last Night, I Had a Nightmare That My Elementary School, Along with My Childhood
Memories, Caught on Fire
Golden Shovel of “Televangelism” by K-Ming Chang
A few hours ago, I dreamt of my childhood burning in prayers. When no
one was looking, grief lit a match behind my elementary school. One
ghost licked the place until it smoked with litanies, blazed with hymns. No one tells
you that to live is to outlive the echoes of your past. No one told me
that to breathe is to kill possible versions of myself. I want to ask God why
I should live and someone else shouldn’t. I want to ask why we
capitalize people’s names, but not their griefs. Should my lover capitalize
my name even after I die. When I’m no longer marrow, just memory. God,
I hate living but love loneliness. Wish I could lodge it down my throat, but
not like a cough. Like my lover’s tongue. I never
thought I would say this, but I wonder what it looks like. The shape of my lover’s ghost.
Mini-interview with Annalisa Hansford
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
AL: During my senior year of high school, I remember taking the train to Boston to visit Emerson College, the school I attend now. I was reading an issue of The Adroit Journal and came across a piece that really changed the way I viewed writing. That piece was “Miner’s Lung” by Lane Devers and I remember reading his bio to find out he was my age, and I was perplexed. His writing was so haunting for someone so young. That piece really showed me what my own writing was lacking and challenged me to push my writing in a way I hadn’t done prior to my time spent in high school. My writing, primarily poetry, used to be so abstract with cliché images and metaphors that didn’t really make sense. Reading Devers’ piece opened up this whole other world of writing possibilities I had yet to explore. I still think about that essay years later and what it’s done for me as a writer.
HFR: What are you reading?
AL: Right now, I’m reading lots of literary magazines and trying to find new poets to expose myself to. I’ve been reading a lot of poetry from K-Ming Chang (obviously), Paige Lewis, Stephanie Chang, and Gaia Rajan. I recently tried reading Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson but couldn’t really get into it, so I stopped.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Last Night, I Had a Nightmare That My Elementary School, Along with My Childhood Memories, Caught on Fire”?
AL: I had this horrible nightmare the night before I wrote this poem about my grade school on fire. I barely remember what happened in the dream now, but when I woke up it felt so real, and I couldn’t quite shake it off. So I wrote a poem about it! The grade school I went to was a Catholic one, so that’s why there’s a lot of religious imagery throughout it. I was inspired by Nova Wang’s 3 Golden Shovels published in Farside Review to write my own. After reading “Televangelism” by K-Ming Chang, I knew I had to write a golden shovel after it. Her language is so brilliant and the themes of grief and ghosts and god went hand in hand with the nightmare I had.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
AL: I’m trying to compose a chapbook. A lot of the poetry I’ve been writing recently has themes of grief and ghosts, so I think that could be an interesting throughline. Poems that investigate where different griefs originate from and what has to die in order for ghosts to live.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
AL: I’m tired of Taylor Swift’s white feminism.
Annalisa Hansford’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in The West Review, Vagabond City, Ghost City Review, and The Lumiere Review. They are probably listening to Gracie Abrams and drinking an iced vanilla matcha latte.
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