Who are you?

I’m Stevie (she/her). I write poems and grocery lists with equal intensity. I own more caftans than pairs of socks and firmly believe in the healing powers of pink noise and palm trees. I’m also a mother, a chronically ill woman, and of Eastern European, Cherokee, and Muscogee (Creek) descent. You can find me writing thoughtful letters to inboxes everywhere via Mother Of and more of my work at steviebelchak.com.

What is your book about?

Full Bleed was written in and of Key West—a place where land dissolves into water, and water takes the land in turn. The term full bleed suggests something spilling past its borders, and in this book, language behaves the same way. Lines blur, meanings pool; the body leaks into the digital, the self seeps into undoing, and the speaker wavers between individual and inheritance, presence and absence, illness and wellness.

Could you tell us a bit about the process of writing this book?

Mile Marker 0 is where people go to run away from something—and toward a kind of nothingness. Many poets and writers (Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Tennessee Williams, Hart Crane) passed through or lived on the island of Key West, if only briefly. Hart Crane once wrote in “O, Caribe”:

“I…
Congeal by afternoons here,
Satin and vacant.”

Every poem in Full Bleed “feels” satin and vacant, because in the Keys–when I was writing–I felt satin and vacant, lulled to sleep by the palms, drawn into a pool of lush suspension by the heat. And, each poem contends, as if by instinct, with matter and matter’s ghost. And the ghosts of Key West? They are ever-present in these poems.

What are some books you’ve read and enjoyed lately and/or books that influenced the writing in your submitted work?

I can’t sing enough praise for Stephanie Cawley’s No More Flowers (Birds LLC). I admire so much of the thinking and the line work, and I’ve found some of the poems in Full Bleed have a kinship–at least structurally–to those in Cawley’s book. 

How would you describe your book using emojis only?

🕳️

(hello darkness, my old friend) 

Anything else you’d like to share?

In the Keys…
The beach sand is imported.
The iguanas are invasive.
You can find the highest point on the island simply by looking for the graves.
The poincianas bloom in May-June, and you don’t want to miss out on their glory.
Catch a sunset from Sunset Pier.
Kayak past Cow Cut and into the mangroves.
Spray yourself with Skin So Soft.
Never sit in shallow water on what appear to be “flowers.”
And, always walk on the shaded side of the street. 

EXCERPT

Existensia

When I say I am I mean I am a study of temporality and temporality’s great
moving floor, that I am almost—I am nearly.

My feet in their spazzolato leather, my body a disqualified wave.

I lick the caked corners of my mouth to know if I will surely die.

My lips redundant, moving shapes of and into air.

In the afternoon light, a trashcan of palm fronds clumps into structural
integrity, cast shadows like warm Lunesta.

In afternoon, light becomes something turned, and I convince myself there
will forever be fifteen more minutes of moving, that it is somehow
necessary to move the dark crow of muscles around in my chest.

A stranger asks me how I describe the essence of being.

Between two hibiscus, a statue of Pan on which a green doggie bowl sits.

Like anyone else I worry it–this–is only rendered permanence.

My heart crude and cut from the back of a tired envelope.

The bowl, its green—a thing that could break and get all over my pants,
sticky.

And, yet, I am told the trees are the trees are the trees—that I think that I
think, therefore I am.

My hair and its rough fennel, my jaw packed through with dirt.

In a poem I read of a woman and her languid fingers languidly fingering
kerosene.

In a poem, a cardboard diorama, oil lamp of moon, tissue of tree.

It calms me to know we all wish to burn a little in our armor, are writing to
and for our possible ends.

I wonder if I, too, will go ever so radiantly.

Or if I will drown under my terrible skin, its veritable flood.

On Thomas, branches punch through a purple ceiling of sky and bicycles
glint like future misgivings.

A belief rises in me that all light is still somehow reaching my object,
person, shimmering arms.

Oh, my hands, I think turning one and then the other over.

Oh, how very beautiful the holes.