Breaking Bread with Poet Mireille Farjo
Who is a writer you feel really influenced the way you read or write poetry?
Matthea Harvey is super great, and I love how character-driven her poems are. Poetry has such a reputation for being a really personal genre, so it’s kind of cool to see poems from the perspectives of fictional people with distinct individual styles. Her series of prose poems about Robo-Boy are some of my favorite things to read! So now I sometimes try to write things with a stronger sense of voice.
What does writing look like for you? What’s your process?
I don’t really have a strict process! Though sometimes I like to write things out by hand before I type them because it feels less official.
Is there a kind of poem you would like to write that you have never written?
Two of my favorite poems are about Popeye, so I would like to write a Popeye poem to keep the genre alive. As far as I know it’s just those two out there, which doesn’t bode very well. So if anyone has encountered any Popeye poems lately, please email me.
If you could travel anywhere in the world, regardless of cost, where would you want to go?
I really want to see Petra.
Anything else you would like readers to know? Maybe advice?
The Reg has a bigger collection of contemporary poetry than you might think! I don’t know if that’s helpful to anyone else, but I didn’t figure it out until halfway through my time here.
Mireille Farjo is a fourth-year studying biology, with a minor in creative writing. She is also an editor
of Sliced Bread.
This Thing That’s Happening
Two Neanderthals got married and I threw
rocks at the wedding. In celebration, of course.
All the minerals were so young back then that
it was hard to remember their names or what
they were there for. They did themselves up
like arrowheads, and I sulked with my hands
folded into little primitive houses. After the
ceremony, we all sat in a circle and ate the
things we picked out of each other’s teeth.
Family-style. Then two of the rocks started
getting married and I decided I’d had enough
of all that. I went and sat at the bottom of a
well with an extinct fish and we moaned about
our romantic failures. It’s so hard to find a
good beau these days. I agreed. Then a hunting
party came along and argued with the fish
about whether or not she was too dead to kill.
There was a wild goose chase for a couple
centuries, until everyone went home or got
distracted by some fruit. A long time ago, this
is still happening. The sun rises a million
billion times. I pick the gummy bits off trees
and chew them like seeds. In the morning I
throw plastic strings of beads at birds until they
dance for me. They shake their feathers in all
different directions, like the stripes that poke
out of the sun. I eat one. Eventually the state
fair comes to the edge of the forest, during the
last big eclipse. I wander the paths with
confetti stomped in and practice setting fires on
balloons. The moon turns in time and I sway.
A little while from now, this is happening as
we speak. The planet swells big as a tick. And
my love is like a corndog. You could eat it off
a stick
Check out more of Mireille’s work in some of our recent issues. Or read the rest of our latest issue, in which this poem appeared, here!