Emily O’Neill | Dear Andy | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Author photo by Jackie Downey

Emily O’Neill teaches writing and tends bar in Cambridge, MA. Her debut poetry collection, Pelican (2015), is the inaugural winner of YesYes Books’ Pamet River Prize for women and nonbinary writers and the winner of the 2016 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Series. Her second collection with YesYes, a falling knife has no handle (2018), was named one of the ten most anticipated poetry titles of fall by Publisher’s Weekly. She is the author of five chapbooks and her recent work has appeared in Catapult, Entropy, Hypertrophic Literary, Little Fiction, Redivider, and Salt Hill, among many others.

Emily O’Neill's Website

Also by Emily O’Neill: a falling knife has no handle Pelican if you could see where I learned to cook

April 2019

Emily O’Neill

Dear Andy

I wonder what routine means to you when I find it so impossible, meaning I cannot locate repetition in my body without it feeling wrong. A stutter. I wish I remembered dancing enough to participate instead of watching. I wish myself a color I'm not. Obsidian. Tigre's eye. Hazel iris or violet like Liz Taylor. My name Velvet & my future like a horse's, a bet ticketed until the machine stutters singles, endless, into a billfold. I'm changing from risk into something flatter. A certainty. Not long ago I was a wound. I haven't healed but did rebrand myself & maybe that shift means I cauterized. Heat forges all kinds of mistakes into necessities. Is that the revision you lean on? Are you ugly until you've decided otherwise? Am I too? Calling myself a good person feels like a role I won with big eyes & some other bargain. I'm a liar like you. I earn it all with attention. I never lose anything I don't mean to. Find what everyone else treats without care. You could write a manual on how to treasure trash & I could do it too & not credit you & you would laugh & call me a worthy heir if I'm lucky enough for that kind of press. I miss knowing who to trust or that possibility not seeming planets away from my body or bodies not failing me with their flatness but isn't it all flatter up close? Aren't I just waiting to feel too iconic to abandon?

I’ve been working on a manuscript of poems about Andy Warhol for a few years now. I find him fascinating because he acted as a bridge between outsider artists and mainstream America, while also shamelessly stealing the ideas and labor of his friends and collaborators. Writing about someone I admire and identify with for his ability to succeed in his field as a queer, working class artist, who I also abhor for his treatment of the people he came in contact with and his attitudes about authorship has been difficult to navigate. He makes me furious, but I also can’t stop thinking about him. In the summer of 2018, during the Open Mouth Writer’s Retreat, Eloisa Amezcua and I were discussing a poem from the project that still hasn’t found its final form. She suggested I just start writing letters to Andy as a way of directly interrogating my complicated feelings towards him. This poem is the third in a series I started following that conversation. In my research, Andy is the center of his world but also an absence, and I used that duality to help me ask questions of my own life as an artist and how identifying that way feels both generous and selfish, depending on which direction I’m examining it from.

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