Early Happy New Year!  Today, I have two poems out in volume 1, issue 3 of SpecPoVerse, “El Grotesco” and “The Poison Dart Frog Prince.” 

For “El Grotesco,” I created a Latin American kaiju.  I wrote this poem almost two years ago, in January 2024, after seeing Ecuador in the news.  My father’s birth country is such a beautiful, beautiful nation plagued in recent years by rising crime and violence. After I found out their government had declared a state of internal armed conflict, and as I read about the impacts to the people caught in the middle, this poem emerged fast. 

For “The Poison Dart Frog Prince,” I wrote a draft right before some of my digital files got corrupted and lost.  This was one of them.  I wallowed in frustration at having lost my new poem… then I pulled myself together and decided to write it again, from scratch, better than before.  I had just attended a talk by Gabriela Denise Frank where she shared some of her concrete poems, such as in the shape of a crab or fish.  That inspired me to write the new version in the shape of a frog, rather than the typical lineated free verse of the missing version.  I’m much happier with this new one.