Ruoyu: Kyla, I love “Heat Exhaustion” for how it presents so many simultaneous, distorted realities. Exhaustion, anger, and frustration all come to a peak here below the heat, but often, it is this very storm of overwhelming emotions that is able to so clearly outline what you truly want. Paul Tran, in the “Notes” section of their collection All the Flowers Kneeling, said something along the lines of how the course of a singular poem should be like a revelatory transformation, and that’s what I feel you do successfully here. How do you speak to these movements toward resolution—despite or because of want and remembering? 

Kyla: I love Tran’s description of a poem as a revelatory transformation! I’m so glad it feels like this poem does that successfully. In this poem, as you said, it’s the overwhelming nature of emotions, and the harnessing of those feelings, that enable the speaker to identify what they want: to escape the heat and their emotions by “killing” the afternoon. This desperate urge to get rid of something, to me, was the tangible core of the poem. From there, I found myself thinking about two questions. First, what happens when the thing one desperately wants to be rid of is finally gone? Second, how can I play with balancing the overwhelming quality of the emotions (and their speed) and specific details (which slow a poem down), and how does slowing a poem down actually help it gain momentum? 

This second question feels aligned with what you’re asking regarding moving towards resolution. While writing, it felt easy to get lost in the speed of the emotions of this piece. In fact, I wrote this poem in one thirty-minute sitting. I think it’s the fastest I’ve ever written a poem, and so having parts of writing it that forced me to slow down was really helpful. By centering the want in specific details and experiences, it felt like I was able to create space to better identify what it was that the speaker wanted, or was remembering. This space also let me choose when to resolve these things and when to leave them unresolved. Although this is a poem that’s moving towards resolution, I don’t know that it actually reaches it—or, at least, it doesn’t reach the resolution the speaker expects to find. 

Ruoyu: What is also so interesting to me about this poem is the kind of disgust the speaker possesses throughout. They promise, “I’ll kill it, I swear…I’ll kill the afternoon. / I’ll stamp it out,” over and over, they swear their own destruction— as if they have something to prove. I was curious as to what you were imagining for the speaker while writing this: we get to see what they hate, what they want to be rid of, but what does the speaker want? What leaves them, stranded, here? 

Kyla: Yes! Great question. The speaker’s wants in this poem feel complicated, for all that the emotions and needs are being streamlined into this single promise of killing the afternoon. The most important part of the poem, to me, comes at the end, when the speaker succeeds in “killing the afternoon,” but is left wanting something. The feelings they thought they’d be able to get rid of in the process of killing are still there—and, if anything, heightened. In that sense, this poem felt like an exploration of the misinterpretation of needs. The speaker knows they want something, they want to escape something, and concludes that they must want to kill the afternoon. This poem is an exploration of what that “something” is—and how, in approaching it through destruction, the speaker is left worse off than they were initially. 

This poem came from a place of tangible emotion for me. As a writer, this mirrors my own experience with being overwhelmed by sensory input, particularly textures. There are moments where I want nothing more than to be rid of a certain smell or texture or feeling—but once it’s gone, I realize that, in fact, I just wanted to be rid of my reaction to the thing, not the thing itself. My interpretation of the speaker in this poem is that although they think what they want is to be rid of the afternoon, in reality they just want to be rid of their desire to kill it. The realization that what was just gotten rid of (permanently!) is something you could have loved, and the isolation of that realization, is what the speaker is forced to grapple with throughout this poem. 

Ruoyu: I saw that you recently held a workshop for Young Poets Workshop (YPW) summer workshop series on “Reclaiming Queer Monstrosity as a Vessel for Love” and I thought that sounded so cool. In “Heat Exhaustion,” too, to tie back to my first question, there is an element of distorted and disjointed perceptions. An element of repulsion. “Heat, dulled like an ingrown toenail,” an itching scalp, “small white nits congealed to each / strand [of hair.]” For you, how does queerness change your relationship to your body? Or bodies, plural? What about embracing supposed “monstrosity” allows you to exist more freely, in so much complexity, that typical conceptions of a body doesn’t give space for? 

Kyla: Such a good question! I’m so glad that you asked about this. This poem feels like an exploration of repulsion and rejection and acceptance. While I didn’t write this poem with Queer monstrosity in mind, I really like this question because the two feel inevitably related. In the YPW workshop, I argued that the relationship between Queerness and monstrosity is twofold: first, that throughout history, monsters in media have been deliberately portrayed using LGBTQ+ stereotypes in an attempt to ostracize Queer identity, and second, that monsters, whether intentionally linked to Queer identity or not, can often reaffirm LGBTQ+ experiences and offer recognition of the feeling of being othered. The main question I asked in the workshop was whether we should lean into or back away from Queer monstrosity—and my answer is that we should lean into it. Doing so allows for the acceptance and celebration of expression that might fall outside of the norm; the enabling of a joyful understanding of authenticity. Most importantly, it seems to allow for a more impartial, thoughtful observation of one’s environment. Embracing “monstrosity” means that things that initially might have been rejected due to perceived monstrosity can instead be understood and appreciated in their entirety. In this poem, despite the general emotional heave, the small moments of noticing feel initially devoid of the same frustration the speaker holds towards, for example, the afternoon. While the heat is uncomfortable and the scalp is itchy, the speaker observes them almost as if from a distance. This feels especially true for the head lice: the speaker “hold[s] them up to the light” as if to get a better look. These moments of pause feel like an embodiment of the open conception of a body enabled through embracing “monstrosity.” There can be noticing for the sake of noticing before judgment is communicated—or, alternatively, a noticing done with the intention of learning to love something that might be otherwise perceived as “monstrous.” 

Ruoyu: Could you tell me about one piece of art—this could be anything from other poems to TV show scripts—that has been deeply formative in creating the spaces your work exists in? In what ways does it continue to compel you towards new understandings? 

Kyla: I’ve been thinking a lot about translation lately, and the way that different texts (everything from the Iliad to Kpop) are rearticulated in different forms. The act of translation encompasses way more than what I think we traditionally think of when talking about translation in poetry (ie. take a poem and rewrite it in a different language). This summer, I attended the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, where Anna Magavern ran a translation workshop, which involved translating an excerpt of a poem by Sappho. One of the things I loved about this workshop is that we were asked to push the concept of translation; students ended up translating this poem not just into other languages, but into math, twitter vocabulary, and the 2024 Presidential Debate between Biden and Trump. This understanding of translation as a reinterpretation and articulation of an experience not necessarily contingent on switching between languages has inspired my approach to writing for all of my life. While I don’t do a lot of traditional translation, writing a poem feels like I’m translating my own mind. I’m trying to interpret my thoughts and feelings and translate them into language to articulate what I’m thinking in a way that makes sense to someone else; I’m trying to encapsulate different parts of my life using images that might not be a description of reality but hold a similar feeling. Thinking about any sort of writing as an act of translation, whether or not it involves different languages, has made the process of writing poems feel more playful, since it feels like I can create a little distance from my own mind and have fun with the process of trying to understand it. It has also helped me find more clarity in how I’m articulating my thoughts. ✺