Max Ureña is a young, existentially exhausted Afro-Hispanic individual who hails from Boston, MA. Max is currently taking a break from school and spending time working with Boston GLASS, a QTPOC centered nonprofit for folx 13-25, as an educator, administrator, & creative writing facilitator. They hope to move somewhere warm and escape the frozen northeast hellscape someday. In the meantime, you can catch them in Boston, writing in Copley Library, being a Bird Dad to their parakeet, Smooch, and posting poems on instagram (@genderhoudini) & Wordpress (Maxime Writes). You can find Max’s work in the Fall 2017 issue of Voicemail Poems as well as the spring 2018 issue of Bloom magazine by redflowersCARE.
"Someone asked me how I knew I was succeeding as an artist and I was like 'when I make them all so uncomfortable that they don’t know how to clap'."
Heart: 87024
by: Max Ureña
once, i was a new mexico desert : dry : parched / full of nothing but spikes / don’t get too close / don’t rest / big city park bench turned cactus // the curls i tug / tumbleweed of lost desire / don’t you know a ghost when you see one? / roadrunner burnt out from the chase / picked eyebrows / fallen lashes, only wish / less of this life // once, i was cold feet / desert-mountain house pacing / why does the coyote chase the roadrunner? / find another dream / there is more to hunger than / desire / something else // tumbleweed blows by / says “remember looking over the mountain & hearing the rooster crow?” & i hear the coyote howl // i grab wood to stoke the fire / keep my heart ablaze
TS: Tell me about your first exposure to poetry.
MU: I think my parents. Growing up my parents would buy me these huge paper pads and we would just sit and have story time. My dad and my mom both used to write a lot as a hobby so they encouraged that from a really young age. So we would just sit on my parent’s bed and make up stories and poems all the time. I would occasionally find my dad’s old journals and they’d be religious inspired prose pieces.
TS: Tell me about your journey through poetry, what content did you deal with, what
forms have you explored?
MU: Like I said, I grew up with poetry from a really young age but I didn’t really start exploring it until I was in high school and doing a lot of angsty teen writing. But we also had a social justice poetry group called Poetic Justice and we would perform at shows. And I did a little bit of protest pieces, and I still do protest pieces exploring police brutality and occasionally gang violence. Nowadays, I more so explore gender, race and the intersection between that I experience as a QTPOC person. Form wise, I recently wrote a weird hybrid form of The Bop by Afaa Michael Weaver and the classic pantoum. George Abraham recently introduced me to Hala Alyan’s poem Wife in Reverse, it’s a ten point poem in reverse chronological order exploring her relationship with her husband and dating back to their courtship. I use that to explore my relationship with queerness starting from where I am now to when I first discovered it or when I had an inkling. Also just generally using slashes to break up poems.
TS: I noticed that in the poem you sent me. Were you inspired by a certain poet or is that something that has just developed in your own writing?
MU: I’ve seen other poets use it but I wanted to explore sentences and word structure in that. There’s a part in the poem where the line can be read as desire something else, like to want something else but also the word desire left on its own.
TS: What have been your influences? This could be writers, social issues, or your
experience as a queer person.
MU: I’m just thinking about all the poets that I love. My friends are the biggest influences, being part of the Boston poet community, has been really meaningful and really helpful. In the first ever baby chapbook that I ever wrote, I wrote an ode to the Cantab Lounge and exploring how when I write poetry, I never think about myself saying it, I think about my friends up on stage saying the words I want to say, like embodying them. Rebecca Lynn has been a really big influence, and Brandon Melendez is really huge. I have a couple of coaches, Catherine Weiss and Robby Dunning who really helped me engage in the slam scene and teach me how to be loud. I also pull from my heritage and being part of the Dominican diaspora and knowing but not knowing where I come from, in the sense that I was raised here primarily as just a regular black person and not being Hispanic. So really engaging with that dissonance in belonging but not really belonging.
TS: How has your poetry changed from before to after coming out?
MU: I feel like my poems used to focus on the outside world and other people because I didn’t want to talk about myself. I would write a lot of angsty shit about boys who didn’t love me and then I was like “hey wait, fuck those boys” and “oh wait, I’m really queer” and I need to write about this to dissect and examine who I am outside of other people and what my identity is. So I’ve written a lot about love in many capacities like loving myself, loving my friends, loving people romantically or in a partnership and sort of how those relationships evolve and devolve. I think I expand more on things I’ve been afraid of like not just identity but religion, I read a lot more on my connection to religion, because I was afraid to in the sense of growing up in a Christian home and being like “oh man, no one’s gonna like me” but then sort of in coming out also recognizing that I have other options for religion, that I didn’t have to be Christian. Now, I’m sort of like a Unitarian Universalist. I’m constantly changing my image of God, like God being a woman or parts of people instead of this patriarchal authoritarian figure.
TS: What challenges have you faced as a queer POC writer? Whether that be societal,
academic, or just general validation.
MU: White people telling me that I write too much about race. That’s garbage, fight me. Also walking into a slam venue, and having to acknowledge and remind myself that my work has worth but won’t score well. Like walking into predominantly white venues, and being like “hey, what’s up, here are my poems about race” and them being so nervous that they don’t clap, which also makes me feel great sometimes because it means they’re thinking. Someone asked me how I knew I was succeeding as an artist and I was like “when I make them all so uncomfortable that they don’t know how to clap”. Also being sort of a femme embodied person, being talked over a lot, and people not really taking me seriously even though I know what I have to say is important. The super masc poets will be valued and scored more for their shitty ass poetry rather than love poems from femme-aligned folx. Slam has a lot of work to do in its internalized misogyny and misogynoir.
TS: Can you talk about the power of reclaiming space, and how you do that with your writing?
MU: I like being really loud and maybe not just in volume, but in impact. Saying things that
people are afraid to say in a way that I feel like only I or other femme QTPOC folx can. I wrote this cosmetic piece called “How to Make America Beautiful” and it’s a list poem examining police brutality and transphobia, through the lens of a Youtube cosmetic video. It’s always really shocking to the audience because they don’t expect that. So utilizing the things I have passion for as a healing mechanism, I’ve rejected notions of femininity for a while sort of being like “I’m trans and therefore maybe makeup isn’t my best thing”. Using that as a way to call out bullshit has been really nice. Being present and disrupting those spaces, being in a slam where there’s mostly white people can be really overwhelming and then I just decide, I don’t even care if I win or lose, I’m just going to do something that is going to shake them up because I can. Being like, not always the “angry black woman” but being present and a quiet thunderstorm.
TS: Do you consider yourself an activist, how does this shine through in your writing?
MU: Oh hell yeah! I always feel weird about the term activist because am I taking enough action to call myself an activist? Or is it like when white people want a cookie for holding a sign? I feel like, yes. I work with queer and trans youth primarily of color, which is part of my day job. I’m spending all my time helping these kids through trauma. I feel like that can be a quiet form of activism but I also do larger things, like holding events that help refugees. I think that shines through from protest poetry and also just the quiet odes that I write for my kids, being like “hey I see you, you’re real whether you feel like you’re not”. Being there and being present.
TS: How have you healed through writing?
MU: Oh boy! I write a lot of therapeutic pieces for myself, what better way to sort out your weird issues than writing a poem about it. Examining my feelings through mythological poems, I’ve written pieces about complex feelings through the lens of Pandora’s box. If I don’t know how to explain a concept to someone I’m like “here let me read you this poem”. Letting myself experience feelings in a way that feels healthy because sometimes crying might be inconvenient when I get a headache after.
TS: Name the poet that impacts you the most or a poem that has impacted you.
MU: I think the poem that really speaks to me the most right now, Brandon Melendez has this poem called Nuestras Lenguas, or Our Languages, and there’s a line in it that says “I will
practice your name until it no longer sounds like an apology”. When I first realized I was trans and needed to change my name, I discovered that line and was like “wow I needed that”. Even before coming out, my birth name was originally one of those weird things that people were like “it’s hard to pronounce” and I was like I need people to actually know how to pronounce this instead of apologizing for fucking it up. I feel like it saved my life in a way. A year after I saw that line, I saw Brandon because he moved from California to Boston and I was like “hey this might feel really weird but your poem saved my life” and now we’re friends. I love him, he’s wholesome.
TS: Tell me a little about the poem you sent me.
MU: I went to a retreat in Jemez, New Mexico called The Heart of It and the number is the
zip code to the town. It was a life changing experience. Desireé Dallagiacomo runs it, and you’re basically in a desert town outside of Albuquerque, you have no cell service, your water is well water, you can get altitude sickness, you walk two miles down the road and see horses. It was an amazing writer’s retreat with people from all walks of life, one person ran a mom blog, one was a social worker, and others were poets in their scenes in their towns. It was really amazing and I cried every single day, the good cathartic cry. When I went there it was a life saving thing for me. I had a really rough time a couple of months before that and I thought I wasn’t going to make it to this retreat. One of my friends was like “Nah man, we’re gonna get you there.” I was burnt out from everything. I remember taking a morning walk by myself and stopping to look across the canyon and hearing this rooster crow. It evoked this spirituality, I had this sense of peace, it was where I belonged and it felt right.
Review + Analysis of "Heart: 87024"
by: Tanairi Sorrentini
Max’s poem was refreshing to read, especially in their use of slashes which reminded me of “The Fat Boy of June” by Cynthia Atkins, and is a form that I don’t see too often. While I can confirm that the poem is set in a New Mexico desert, based on references in the poem and some context they were able to provide for me during the interview, there is an exciting ambiguity that is draped over the poem in interpreting the conflict, which fully leaves interpretation up to the reader. There are elements of discomfort which are evoked by language Max uses like “dry : parched / full of nothing but spikes” as well as a search for belonging, which comes through in lines like “big city park bench turned cactus”. Images of deserts weave in and out of the lines throughout the poem to ultimately set a scene of a hunger or thirst, perhaps after traveling a long way, for something that has not yet been attained.