In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Michaela Chairez
Your poem, “On the Eucalyptus Trail” starts off with the powerful sentences, “I tell my friend the city is a whitewashed tomb.” What was the inspiration for this piece?
The inspiration behind this piece is based on my hometown. I have a love/hate relationship with the city I grew up in. The phrase, “whitewashed tomb,” is a Biblical allusion that Jesus used to call the religious hypocrites as being beautiful and clean on the outside, but inwardly they were dead, which is sometimes how I feel about the city.
In the middle of the poem, the phrases carry this shh sound, kind of like a hushing, when speaking about the absence of language. What was your intention with these syllables?
While writing this, it happened organically, which is one of those beautiful moments in writing where it flows naturally together. Though I did focus on the word “whitewashed” and how I felt suburbia whitewashes and assimilates people into a certain mold as my springboard for the words that had the shh sound.
You use enjambed rhymes so well throughout. How do you find the rhythm when you’re writing or editing?
I love to read it out loud many times till it sounds right for all my poems. If it doesn’t sound right, I’ll keep repeating the line or word and play around with it until I feel that it is right for the poem. It’s funny too because I normally don’t rhyme in my work either, at least not that I’ve noticed, but for this poem it just worked to flow in that vein.
There’s the whitewashed city with “Light colored houses” and then shades of green, in nature. How does the green/olive emphasize the whitewashing in the poem?
The shades of green to me speak to how nature cannot be controlled. In the poem my parents painted our house an olive green, and HOA got upset because it didn’t fit their light color scheme, which is so silly to me. And my mom stood by the color she chose, and they never bothered about it again. So I do see the green as a color of resistance.
Though I did learn too from my workshop class that eucalyptus trees are symbols of colonialism, since they are invasive and were planted by colonial powers to alter landscapes to their advantage, which I thought was interesting and added another layer of meaning to the poem in the way that nature can be manipulated.
What themes do you find that your work circles back to?
Sometimes it’s about the place. Other times, it’s family and relationships. For me, I see my poems as small moments that I’m trying to capture on the page, so that I understand the moment better or see a memory differently in a new way.
What authors and texts have helped shape your work, or are your favorites?
Juan Felipe Herrera and Natalie Diaz are my favorites and inspire how I write today.
What are you working on now?
Right now, I’m working on poems that are in conversation to art, whether that’s a painting, a movie, or another poem. I love how art can be in conversation with each other through poetry.
Michaela Chairez is a Latina writer from the Inland Empire. She holds an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Her work can be found in Quiet Lightning, Exposition Review, California Quarterly, Transfer Magazine, The Ana, and The Acentos Review.
