Andy Young‘s second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in October 2024. (You can order it here.) She is also the author of All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014) and four chapbooks. Young grew up in southern West Virginia and has lived most of her adult life in New Orleans, where she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared in Identity Theory, Drunken Boat, and Michigan Quarterly Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, her work has been translated into several languages, featured in classical and electronic music, in flamenco and modern dance performances, and in jewelry, tattoos, and public buses. – Alanie Lacy
Alanie Lacy: You have a book coming out in October 2024, Museum of the Soon to Depart, could you talk a little bit about what this book is and how the idea came to be?…
lightning strikes splits me open ozone sharp and pungent filling the skies before thunder can do its tepid heralding my favorite view out a window is a grey expanse ripped open by electric lavender knives but i had never imagined the atoms their trembling after vibrating with exothermic pangs begging to turn back but this is all there is the mean bifurcation of a trunk and janus with head turned not looking into the past but gaze palsied rooted to the present burning foliage or to future growth yes even from the charred remains tiny rootlets spring upwards feeding and reveling with no sense of decorum at all this is what happens when the tree falls in the wood with no one there to bear witness no one to weep just mundanity crawling along like an infant
She spies a young blond man with small ferret-like hands raking as she approaches the last trailer in the lot. The great fire is closing in, its smoke rising high just beyond the hill, and she is almost done with her shift.
“What are you doing?” she inquires, clipboard pressed to her orange vest as if for protection.
“I want my own fire,” says the young man with tiny eyes set close, just as a toothless woman in galoshes, a shift and red bandana emerges from the trailer. “Bader, gimme that thing. You ain’t doin’ what I think you’re doin’. Take your play matches. Go on while I get ready. I ain’t gonna holler after you, boy.” Bader drops the rake, grabs the large box from his mother like a prize.…
It was said he was good to her, bought her the house of her dreams, taught her how to buy clothes from runway shows in the city, took her to restaurants where meal prices never appeared on her menu. He opened doors for her, stood when she approached or left the table, spoke politely and endearingly to her in public, spoke even more lovingly to her in private.
It was said she enjoyed his old-fashioned chivalry, soaked it up the way a poppy soaked up the sun, delighted in the one-of-a-kind jewelry he had made for her on special occasions and not so special occasions—like her 33rd and a half birthday, and the completion of her fourth week of tennis lessons, and because the fifth of the month happened to fall on a Wednesday, which happened to be the same day she was born.…
In Texas, They declared a heartbeat alone enough life to preserve. I watch my baby girl Suspended in darkness, her heart barely blipping at 120 bpm. She has a tail, paddles for hands and stumps for feet, two dark spots where eyes will be and a spinal column. No head, no brain, nowhere near human, but a heartbeat pulsing through the womb I waited my whole life to hear.
In Elizabeth City, They declared a grown man, not worth saving. He had a heartbeat, and 10 kids, and a spouse, and four decades of HIStory. And two hands on the wheel. The thunder in his chest pounding in the darkness until he was aborted by people who promised to protect and serve him.
Today’s lunch break couldn’t come fast enough. Sheila unclipped the hand radio from her belt, placed it in the charging station and stepped out of the admin office. She swiped her punch card at the row of timeclocks across from the vending machines. Sheila returned the punch card into the plastic sleeve of the lanyard draped over her white silk button-up shirt. Bolted against the employee hallway wall, were six of the two-dozen time clocks in the Paradise Capital Hotel which had five-hundred and fifty-six employees. She removed her lanyard and tucked it into the jacket pocket of her Navy-blue pantsuit. The casino floor was slow as usual. Paradise Capital was a mid-size casino in Miami, Florida. The pit was nearly empty. Paradise Capital attracted a crowd of Floridians, snowbirds and elderly tourists who preferred digital slot machines over blackjack, craps, and roulette tables.…
You came to us with your cataracted mother – matching duo in a stippled vertical lattice of black and grey after a thunderstorm in a swollen sodden summer Ears bigger than ghosts big as wolves hearing the horizon perched radar on a rail of a body that has to fatten up to honor them
Rick you should see how he has made the upside-down envy gravity and how he asks questions with a peek through laced leaves He sleeps in a planted pot camouflaged indigenous on our sun warmed patio or in woolen knitted hollowed hole He would have played with you In a whirling game of fast varsity gymnastics he would have walked on your chest and purred In your last bed or your first
Pick up a stick with feathers my brother, past the place where the owl inhabits night
He is a creature of freedom as you are now, finally from a boulder of debt and breathing wait until she carves his face in a pumpkin when snow comes falling with the last mandarin maple keep him safe in those thickets of cattails
