Prodigal
My phone rings all hours
of the night with my grandmother
wanting her mother, her sister,
her husband, anyone dead
who still walks the house
in her mind. I repeat a script
my mother taught me
to soothe her back to sleep,
then try it on myself,
ears open to the screech owls
and red-crowned parrots
commingled in the blue gum.
I dream the whole neighborhood
a plain of dust, carriages drawn
by zebras loaned from a traveling
circus. An Indiana proselytizer
screams the land is prodigal,
charmed to purge itself back
to its desiccated roots.
My grandmother stirs, dials a wrong number:
our former neighbor, the superior
court judge who washed
her Camaro in a pink bikini.
I want to dial wrong numbers
like that. We count again
toward a million, hit the upper forties
when she dozes off. I continue
counting toward the total
of my debt, listening to the house’s
joints crack. A streetsweeper’s
revolving lights strobe the bay
windows like a flashlight
through the womb.
Mini-interview with Michael Juliani
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
MJ: A few moments in high school woke me up to poetry. I read Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B” and Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool” in a summer school class. We had an assignment to write a poem in response to those poems. I think that was the first “real” poem I ever wrote. Over the next year or so, I found Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and a whole range of beautiful work that provided fuel I’m still burning.
HFR: What are you reading?
MJ: I like to read a few different forms at once. I just finished Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s novel Trouble Finds You and it’s one of my favorite novels I’ve ever read. I also keep returning to Madeleine Cravens’ poetry collection Pleasure Principle. I’m about to dive into Querida by Nathan Xavier Osorio, one of my good friends and a brilliant poet.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Prodigal”?
MJ: I had just moved back to my hometown in Southern California after eight years in New York. My grandmother, who helped raise me, was in the throes of dementia. I was living in my childhood home and helping to care for her. The return to the characters, scenes, and settings of my childhood, but in this new and fraught context, fed me this poem. I think it came to me during a walk—a lot of my poems do. Couplets are a good form for the Notes app.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
MJ: Like with my reading habits, I enjoy working on a few things at once. You might have absolutely no motivation to write a poem, but you can spend time on your fiction. There’s a poetry collection I’m sending out to contests and publishers, and I’m working on the next one. I’m also writing a couple of longform narrative things. I like keeping multiple tabs open at once, so to speak. Variety inspires me.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
MJ: I remember being a young teenager and disappearing into the Internet on a Friday night—MySpace, AIM, AOL. I’m part of the generation that came of age with the Internet, meaning that I’m part of the last group that remembers life before it. I think a lot about how this massive societal shift happened during our lifetimes. So much of modern life can feel disenchanting, it’s easy to forget the profundity of it.
Michael Juliani is a poet, editor, and writer from Pasadena, California. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in outlets such as the Bennington Review, Epiphany, Bear Review, SARKA, and the Washington Square Review. He lives in Los Angeles.
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Heavy Feather Review 