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Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, Give Me A Sign.

The poet Alexandra Lytton Regalado was born in El Salvador, but during the Civil War there, in the ’80s, her family moved to the United States, to Miami. And that’s where she grew up. But since then, she’s moved back to the country of her birth—she and her husband now live in San Salvador, the capital, with their three children.

But it’s in the United States that she wrote most of the poems in her latest collection, Relinquenda. Her father was ill—had been ill for many years, first throat cancer, then stomach—but now he was actively dying. Not long after he died, the borders closed—we’re now at the start of the pandemic—and for several months, Alexandra was stuck in the US. It’s during that time of suspended animation that she wrote the poems in Relinquenda, wrestling with the sudden upheaval in her life. She wrote the poems, sent them off, and before she really knew what was happening, the manuscript had been picked up by Reginald Dwayne Betts and selected as the winner of the National Poetry Series. Only, by the time the collection was ready to go to print, more upheaval had come her way: first her grandmother died, then, without any warning, her mother died of a heart attack.

When I sat down to talk to her, I didn’t want to ambush her with all this sadness, so I started with a lighter question: why did she decide to move back to El Salvador?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: The decision to come back was because my husband proposed to me and he was living in El Salvador at the time. And so, if he had been living in China or Africa or anywhere else, I would have said yes. So it was just sort of luck that I came back. But it was a life-changing thing, and I’m really grateful to be back here. I feel like there’s a lot of opportunities to help people and to become really sort of interested and reconnect, reengage with the culture, particularly in the arts and literary scene, for me.

Helena de Groot: And when you were living in Miami, did your family take frequent trips back or really, when you moved for your husband, that was kind of the first time that you were there?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Well, we did come back for summers. I would say there was about a good, you know, eight-year period where we didn’t come back when the war was pretty heavy. I think the last time my mom saw a body strung up on a tree on the road coming back from the airport, she said, “You know what?” to my father, “We can’t come back anymore.” But I always had a very strong connection to my country. My mother particularly was the one that always guided me back to the art, the literature, the culture, the traditions. And at home, you know, she only spoke to us in Spanish, and she was the teller of all of the stories and sort of the keeper of all of those recuerdos. And so, I hear her all the time still in like, when I hear, like, certain Salvadoran words or certain traditions that happened and that I keep specifically because of what she taught us.

Helena de Groot: Can you give me an example?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Well, during Christmas time, there is a tradition to recreate a nativity scene, but it’s not a traditional nativity scene, where it’s just the family of Jesus. It’s actually becomes a whole town scene, where there is a marketplace, and the figures are made of clay. And it’s a specific clay that is from a town called Ilobasco. And they make these tiny figurines. I mean, there’s a woman who is famous for being the creator of these figures, and her name is Maria Dominguez. And it was said that she used to paint these figures that were so tiny, sometimes with just two feathers, a paintbrush that was made of two little hairs. And so they’re miniature. They’re like the size of, you know, the top of your pinky, some of them. And so, it’s really beautiful and intricate. And you make, you make the whole scene out of this like different colored sawdust. And you make the mountains with different pieces of moss and things like that. And then the tradition was that you would go from house to house, seeing these different nativity scenes, the nacimientos. And so I’ve started doing that in the neighborhood. I let everybody know that we’ve set up this big nativity and that if they want to come by and see it, and they bring their kids. And so it’s very special.

Helena de Groot: Oh, God. I mean, also like to have a whole holiday around it and to see those creations of your neighbors, it must be, that must be wonderful. A lot of work, but really, really beautiful. You said in an interview once that people abroad probably know mostly the violence when they hear about El Salvador, you know, whether it’s the civil war or gang violence or other human rights violations today, you know, because of President Bukele. And I’m wondering what, you know, like, violence on the news is one thing, but it’s so different from like what it’s like in real life, right? And so I’m just wondering, like, is a big part of your day to day, the day to day of your family, or is it for you also something that you see on the news?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Okay. It is something that you wake up and look in the newspaper every day and it’s terrifying. I mean, just today I was seeing that in the year 2020, the rates of pregnancies of girls between 10 and 14 years old had gone up 79%. So that is just horrifying. And I do think that it is very important for people internationally to try to tune in to the real news of what’s happening in El Salvador, because I think there’s a very different perception of the way that we’re evolving or developing politically or economically. And right now, we are in, you know, complete censorship. When we want to talk about important issues, we have to turn our phone onto airplane mode, because there’s proof that our phones are being tapped. And there’s a general fear of the things that you say. And I mean, we’re entering the seventh month right now of a state of exemption, which basically means that anybody that’s suspicious can be taken to jail without any questions and not have any legal representation for an unknown amount of time. And that all relates to human rights violations. So what can I say is that, it has touched us personally as a family during the war, and that’s why we still have this custom, which I call—it’s a terrible custom. It’s just sort of like a thing now, you don’t think about it, but we, you know, our cars are bullet proofed. And I think that’s like a lingering thing that has stayed from the war times. But I think that the real danger is for the people that live in marginal neighborhoods and that have to take public transportation. We personally had someone who worked with us for a very long time. Her daughter was kidnapped and we tried to help. You know, we hired a private investigator and it ended in total heartbreak because they found her body tortured. And just in a, in a, in a coffee sack in some plantation, lost in a mountain. So, I mean, that feeling of threat is still very present, and there’s like an unease, an anxiety of what’s going to happen.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. That’s really close to home when it happens to someone who has worked for you for a long time. I mean, that must be very different from seeing it on the, on the news.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Yeah, I knew the girl. I’d seen her and her brother and sisters since they were, you know, little kids. But I’m very conscious that I live in a bubble. But we, rather than just relax and feel comfortable to retire in that bubble, because you can’t really, the only way that you feel that you can do something about it is by trying to work actively in communities that need this help or with artists or writers who are, you know, carrying along that voice and that vision, even though very much right now is trying to be squashed.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And when you’re writing and you’re sitting with that disconnect between, on the one hand, the bubble that you know you live in and on the other hand, the violence and injustice that exists kind of right outside that bubble, do you feel like there is a place for that in your writing?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Well, I’ll tell you something interesting, Helena. When I was working with the publisher to decide on the text that was going to be on the back cover of the book or the way that it was going to be proposed to libraries, there was an insistence to put the words “civil war” in there. And I said, “This is very strange,” because my book is really about, you know, the human body and illness and a lot of existential questions, like it’s definitely more human. I mean, the Civil War is always going to be a part of our history because that’s our origin story. You know, I didn’t get to grow up in El Salvador because we left because of the Civil War. And so that’s why I’m half American. And I think that’s why so many of us Salvi writers who come back to El Salvador want to investigate the Civil War, because that is actually like a character in their history. It’s a part of their roots. But it kind of disconcerted me a little bit, that insistence upon having the words “civil war” included in the summary of my book. Because, you know, I found it a little bit like a push to stick to a sort of stereotype or what was considered sexy or considered of interest, let’s say.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: And so that’s the thing that I’m sort of struggling with, is that, you know, really, are we, because we are Salvadoran, you know, always going to have to come back to the Civil War as a touchstone to be relevant?

Helena de Groot: Yeah, right. Yeah, because the book is so much about the process of seeing your father suffer from cancer and ultimately die. And I understand what you’re saying. Like, why is that not enough? You know, like, why does there have to be this whole dramatic backdrop that you weren’t even there for?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Exactly.

Helena de Groot: But that is the kind of strange thing about grief also, right. Like it doesn’t care what kind of scene it enters, you know, it just enters. I wanted to go to the title of your book, Relinquenda, which as a non-Spanish speaker, I first thought was Spanish. Kind of sounds Spanish, you know. But then I saw that it’s Latin, actually, “to be relinquished.” So I was just wondering like, A) why Latin? I think it’s an interesting choice. And B) Why that title? Why “to be relinquished”?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Well, all good mottos are in Latin. And so.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: And so, that sort of became my personal motto. But to be sincere, I adopted it from my mother, because it was a word that she had written in one of her journals. And I actually saw it before she died. And I said, you know, “What is this?” And she said, “Oh, isn’t that a beautiful word? It’s this idea that todo lo tenes que dejar: You have to leave everything behind.” And my mom and myself are very much clingy people in that we are collectors and it’s very hard for us to be minimalistic. But I, so I think that as a motto, you have to try to aspire, you know, to something. And that idea of letting go for a long time has been sort of poking at me. And my mom had said, “When I move from Miami and back to El Salvador, my dream would be to buy a piece of land somewhere lost on a little mountain and build a house there and call it Relinquenda.” And that, well, that never happened. She died on January 1st of this year. But I think that for me, naming the book Relinquenda, I thought, “Well, this is where we can live. And this will be the thing that I’ve created based on these ideas that my mom has taught me.”

Helena de Groot: I love the symb—like, the image of having to live in the house of letting go. And yeah, as you already said, your mother passed away in January and then your grandmother just a few months before that, and then your dad, I think a year before that. It sounds like an almost inconceivable amount of loss to have to deal with at once. How do you make sense of it? How do you deal?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: I think it’s really beautiful what you said earlier about, you know, loss just comes to you without any regard of what’s happened before or later. And so, you know, that idea of, I’ve heard enough, you know, life cannot deal, you know, one more bad hand to me is sort of ridiculous, you know? And it was crazy because, you know, the people that we’ve named are my immediate family. But my mother’s brother, my mother’s sister, my best friend’s husband, a good friend, also died all in this. So I think the tally in the end was something like seven people in the span of maybe two and a half years. So it was, it was a lot. But each of them was so different because, you know, especially when you have, when you have a loss, like a death like my father’s, which was over the span of six years and two different kinds of cancer, and so, this book in particular, Relinquenda, is not so much about mourning. It’s more about like pre-grieving or this idea of, how do you handle pain? How do different people handle pain? What does the way that we handle pain say about us? How do we care for others and how, how do we care for ourselves? Because I think in those moments of loss is when you learn a lot about yourself and, and sure, I think that the title of my book is Relinquenda. But what I learned or what I’m trying to learn is not only how to let go, but that there are absolutely some things in this world that we have to try to cling to and stay close to as much as possible. You know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: And some of those things you have time to prepare. And some of the things you don’t have time to prepare for. Like my mother, I mean, we had just finished celebrating New Year’s Eve. We were standing on a beach watching fireworks. My kids had gone off to a late night New Year’s party. It was 4:00 in the morning and the phone rang. And it was my sister saying that our mother had died. That was like, shock, you know. But I don’t think that that feeling of mourning and loss has a closure to it. It’s just, you just got to take it in the waves that it comes in and, and just learn to live with it. I think that that’s what has been the best thing for me is to, to really, to be present in those sadnesses. And if I feel like staying in bed until noon, then I do. If I can. You know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I have one last question about that, but it’s kind of more related to the book because, you know, I know that books have kind of a long gestation period, you know, okay, there’s the writing. But then even once the manuscript is ready from your side and then it goes to the publisher, and then there’s an editor and then there’s like some kind of promo team. And, you know, there’s this whole machinery that takes its time also. And as you said, the book is mainly about pre-grieving your father. And I imagine by the time the manuscript was ready, the poems were in there, then all these other deaths, you know, started happening. And so I’m wondering, given that the book, in a way, is kind of like a time capsule, are there things that you look at with different eyes now? Are there like little breadcrumbs that you feel like, “Oh, I’ve left this for myself and thank you, former self,” or something else that feels jarring now, like, is there anything where you’re like, “Huh”?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Yeah, I think I just posted this morning saying that I was feeling really vulnerable and exposed because I wrote the book in such a short period of time while I was in lockdown, when I was separated from my husband and kids when the borders closed. So it was pretty intense writing, and it was taken pretty much directly from my journals. And so, there’s a lot of unfiltered feelings there. And this rawness that I’m feeling is because when you’re grieving someone, you know, especially someone that you sort of have had a difficult relationship with—my father and I were very different, and I think in a lot of ways I resisted being like him. But then I realized along the way how much I was like him. There’s a lot of mixed feelings that you go through, which, you know, can be like anger and resentment and disappointment also, which is a hard thing to hear from a child to a parent. And then, you know, you have your own self-questioning of like, “Well, what kind of parent am I?” You know, how am I, you know, living up to those high standards that I’m trying to establish from my father. And so, going back to your question about it being a time capsule, there’s a lot of interesting things that happen once the person that you’re learning about in their process of dying, once they’re gone, you know, there’s this idea of people becoming angels. And in a way, it’s almost like their memories become glorified, you know?

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Like they become even better than they were in real life, somehow purified through the fire of death and pain and all of that. And so sometimes when I read these poems, I think, “God, I’m so harsh.” You know, why do I have to describe all of these, you know, bodily functions that my mother at the time was like, “Please, why are you including those disgusting details?” And I’m like, “Mom, because it’s beauty and terror, you know, like you can’t separate them.” And then I think, “Wow, you know, I was very harsh.” I don’t know, I, and I think that’s why I feel sort of sensitive about these poems, because if the book hadn’t been picked up so quickly, I might have left it in a drawer for some time. And as it stewed there, I might have gone back to it and said, “No, no, I can’t say those things” or “No, no, I shouldn’t project him that way.” But because it was so raw and so fresh and so immediate, those things just launched into the world and now they are what they are. And I’m sort of facing them in a way that, that as a writer, as a poet, you know, you’re not writing the truth, you know, but you’re writing the way that you remember those experiences.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: And so I just have to let it be and let the book be what it is and sort of separate myself and launch it, as you said, like a time capsule.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Well, as you were talking about once someone dies, even if they were not your father, but in general, if they were, like, abusive or whatever, and then they die and all of a sudden everyone is so complimentary about, you know, as if the life never happened. I don’t hear that that’s what you’re saying. You know, I don’t hear that you’re saying, like, “I’m now going to just ignore the difficulties that existed between us.” I hear that there is, yeah, that maybe some things you can let go of. I’m just wondering, like, why? Why is that? Why is it that kind of almost the moment that someone dies, certain things that would just irritate the hell out of us just no longer do. What happens?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: I think it’s, I don’t know if it’s sort of like this religious idea of pain and suffering being a purifier, a cleanser of sorts. But there’s a sense of empathy that is so immediate that, that there’s that strange sort of distance that happens, I think, that when someone dies, you know, their life becomes sort of like accordioned out in a way that you can say, “Oh, now I understand why they were so angry. Because they were frustrated because X or Y situation didn’t turn out the way that they wanted.” And so, there’s almost like an implicit need for, for forgiveness, you know, to be like, “Oh, but they’re gone now and they won’t inflict those discomforts on me anymore. And so the healthiest thing for me to feel is to say, ‘Thank you for having lived your life the way that you lived it and for whatever you could give me. And now goodbye.’” You know? There’s a poem where I write about how that forgetting is a, is a kind of freedom. And I’m thinking about all of the people that I know that have died in the last seven years. And my friend whose husband passed away in a terrible accident, she said to me jokingly, “Well, it turns out that my husband is an angel and that he always was an angel.” And she said it sort of laughing. And I don’t know what happens in that transition of death and suffering that afterwards those memories of those people become glorified somehow.

Helena de Groot: You mean she was laughing because all of a sudden she was looking at her husband as like this all-wonderful creature, while maybe in life, he was just a human, you know? Good and bad.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Exactly. Exactly.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: And so I very much identified with that, because it was like, “Oh, you know, your father was such a good man. He was this and that.” And I’m like, 100%, you know? But we have to take the whole picture into account.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. God that makes the idea of a time capsule even more poignant, I think, you know? That you didn’t, in a way, that you couldn’t rewrite the story through the lens of forgiveness.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Yeah. Yeah, it was kind of taken away from my hands. And that’s why I said I think that if I had had more time with it, I might have spoiled it. I might have, I don’t know, like, lacquered it over in some way.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I was wondering if we can get to a poem, maybe just the title poem of your collection. And like your book it’s called “Relinquenda,” which now I have heard you pronounce and I’m trying to do it correctly.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: And that’s right. “Relinquenda.” Okay.

(READS POEM)

The snake always slips into the bushes when I start down the path.

The snake is just the tail end of what’s happening.

The snake doesn’t look back.

The snake is not an animal I identify with.

I mean, it’s a garden-variety queen snake but I’d still lop off its head with a machete.

Isn’t it expected that one thing will chase another?

Isn’t it normal to want your space?

About this snake, it’s not the kind that holds its tail in its mouth.

About this machete, I do not own one.

About this path, I chose it.

It’s narrow.

About this metaphor, it stretches out like a tightrope.

And these lines force one foot in front of the other.

And these steps are the ones I have to take.

About the snake, I must circle back.

About the time I left the door open.

About the zero surprise I felt when our eyes locked.

As if what I needed was a mirror.

As though I would always lead her in & back her into a corner.

As soon as I extend my hands, she coils into herself.

As soon as I take another step, she slashes the cord.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. I love how you kind of flit back between metaphor and real observation. You know, so many times in your poem, I thought, “This is a symbol,” Like, “About this snake, it’s not the kind that holds its tail in its mouth.” You can already see the symbol, right? But then also, “I mean, it’s a garden-variety queen snake,” you know, like, no, no, this is an actual snake we’re talking about. Not a drawing of a snake. Yeah, not a symbol. And yet, you know, it has a lot of symbolic weight in this poem. And so I’m wondering, what is a snake to you?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Well, there’s a lot of animals in Relinquenda, and unlike my father, who was very science minded, I’m really into symbols. And for whatever reason, during the time that I was writing this book, I felt like animals were popping up all over the place, giving me these messages. And this event actually happened. I was staying at my aunt’s house, and I would walk the one block from my aunt’s house to my grandmother’s house where my mom was living for those three and a half months. And that snake would always be sunning itself on the paving stones and, and every day that I would see it, I would think, “You and I, we’re going to have an encounter soon.” And it was just like a thought, you know, like, I’m not necessarily afraid of snakes, because I like all kinds of animals including ones that people consider nasty. And so the snake in El Salvador, and I think just all over the world, you know, is an animal that is naturally feared. You know? It’s the symbol of evil. And I remember my mom, whenever anybody would say “culebra,” she would say, “lagarto, lagarto.” And that was a sort of like a cleansing phrase, some sort of, you know, superstition, that even saying the word was somehow evoking an evil to be present. And what most struck me about that snake was that, one day, I didn’t see the snake, but I saw the entire snake skin. And it took a photo of it because I was so, you know, just totally in awe of the way it stripped itself. And you could see the perfect eye slits and everything.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: And I thought, “Okay, maybe this is the encounter I’m going to have with you. And this is something that you’re telling me.” Curiously, another day I forgot to leave the screen door closed. And so when I came back from my grandmother’s house, the snake followed me into the house. And I thought, “Here it is, you know, this is me facing myself or facing my fears, facing my anxiety, all of those things that I willed upon myself because I thought them and I invited them in, you know, and I left the door open for them, you know, literally.” And so that for me was the opening of the book, because this whole book is, for me, this contemplation of, you know, overthinking, totally afraid with anxiety, looking everywhere for answers, and wanting some sort of definite, you know, resolution from the universe, from God, from myself, you know, to say, “Don’t worry, what you’re doing is enough,” or, you know, “Please move in this direction.” And that really I mean, that nature, nature is going to do what it wants. It’s not tamed, it’s wild. And it may have absolutely nothing to do with me. And so that sort of self-centered thinking of, “I invited this in and it’s all because of me,” sort of became ridiculous. And I wanted to explore that snake as a mirror that I had created, in a way.

Helena de Groot: That is so interesting. I mean, because, you know, yeah, in the first verse you write, “The snake is not an animal I identify with.” And then once the ‘you’ and the snake lock eyes, you know, “As if what I needed was a mirror.”

. So it like really changes quickly from like, look, this snake has nothing to do with me, you know, to like, well, actually, it’s a mirror. And you know, another thing that I noticed in this poem and in many poems in your book is this kind of tug of war between what is fated, you know, like this fated encounter, and what is your choice. You know, like, for instance, you write, “these are the steps I have to take.” And then you also write, “About this path, I chose it.” And I feel like that’s, you know, that is so poignant when it comes to letting go. You know, like, on the one hand, it’s fated: people and things are snatched away from us. We have no choice in the matter. But then also, we have a choice in the matter of how we go on. And so I’m just wondering, can you tell me a little bit about how you relate to fate and fatedness and how you see your own choice and free will in that?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: So, the time period I wrote this was a time period where all of us were sort of freaking out. You know, we didn’t know what the rules of the world were anymore. And I think all of us were sort of spiraling. You know? What’s going to happen next? Or somewhere, somehow, teach me how to live through this. And so, during that time period, I also started thinking about my Catholic upbringing. I went to a Catholic school all of my life. My mom brought us up to go to church every Sunday. My dad was an atheist, though. He never went with us. And he was all about living your best life right now in the moment. And so it was very strange to be brought up, you know, with those two sort of ideologies in our house. And so, regarding the idea of fate, I think that what we talked about earlier, about living in relinquenda, is really the heart of the matter, because you can’t just make a choice and say, “Okay, that’s it, I’ve made the choice. And my—I, now I’m going to make a decision to let go and to hold onto only the most essential things.” It’s a thing you have to wake up every day and do. It’s an action, right? So like, this idea, this idea of living in relinquenda is more what I’m trying to do, because you can’t just arrive at relinquenda. It’s not like a place that you reside in. And so I think that there’s definitely a sense of personal choice involved, because you can’t control what’s going to happen. You know, like all mindfulness and great teachers will say, the only thing you can control is the way you respond to it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, right. But I mean, you were talking also about that letting go is not a, it’s not a thing you do once, it’s a thing you do over and over again, that you wake up to every morning. And it made me think of the epigraph by Emily Dickinson that opens the book. And I was just wondering if you can read that epigraph and then tell me a little bit, you know, about why you chose that.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Yeah. So Emily Dickinson says, “Renunciation is a piercing Virtue / The letting go / A Presence.” I mean, I actively looked for a quote from Emily Dickinson. And when I came upon that, I was like, “Oh, Emily, you just wrote that for me.” I mean, it was, it was something that I felt very important, because renunciation, you know, saying no, or, you know, somehow cutting this cord, is a virtue because there’s a sense of decisiveness in that, right? Like an instant moment where you resolve to do something. But I think that what really resonates with me is that idea of letting go being a presence, because that is exactly what we’ve, you know, sort of been trying to summarize. And Emily has done so in such an amazing way, you know.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) She needs two words, that’s it.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: That’s it!

Helena de Groot: That’s crazy.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: I was like, “Thanks, Emily. You just wrote my entire book in these three lines.” (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) Totally. Yeah, but luckily, we keep forgetting, so we can keep coming back to her. You know, she’s never, she’s never done telling us in two words, you know?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. You already said that, you know, you grew up Catholic and that your mother was religious and that your father was not. And so I’m wondering, what would you describe—how would you describe your current faith practice?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: I think I have been very curious about solitude and hermitage, and this idea of really wanting to retreat into the self. I’m looking for a lot of silence. Going back to this idea of learning a lot about ourselves in the way that we handle pain, when I had my first child, I thought that I would want to have the delivery room full of my mom, my husband, my brother, videoing, my two best friends with me. And I just couldn’t, I couldn’t process the pain. I couldn’t, couldn’t deliver that child, because I didn’t want to have spectators. I wanted it all for me and I, I needed to be alone with my pain. And so I think that right now, I’m finding that if I don’t have these moments to myself and, you know, the best place to be by yourself is in nature. Or reading, or writing. Those, for me, are sort of my spiritual practices. I like to go to church, not to hear mass, I like to go there to feel the silence and to light a candle. I don’t know. I feel like religion, you know, the definition of the word is “way of life.” And I feel like in a way, right now, I want to learn from so many other religions and sort of create my picnic basket of what works for me. And hopefully, you know, what I’m teaching my children is just to be good humans and learn how to live on the earth in a way that’s like, you know, with respect and a sense of community. That’s pretty much what it boils down to, I think.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I love that you, that you take these two complementary parts from it, you know, the importance of, of being a good person in community, and then also, sort of asserting your need for solitude. And especially when you’re in pain. And I was wondering if we can get to another poem, the one that’s called a “Hermitage.” I don’t know how you—how do I pronounce this?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Yeah. Yeah. Hermitage.

Helena de Groot: “Hermitage.” So it’s on page 71.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: I got it. Okay.

(READS POEM)

Hermitage

Say there’s an animal surfacing.

Say it is a fin or a mouth.

Hunger seeps between the rocks.

Say there’s a haze caulking tree limbs to cloud.

I am fed by silence.

The neighbor’s face rises above the fence

But when I call, he does not respond.

I would like to think I do not need anyone.

I drift above the palms, pen in hand,

While a leashed animal snuffles at my feet.

The neighbor’s path descends to black sand,

The ocean’s silk cut with lace.

Say the animal hides behind me, a shadow.

The waves throw up their arms.

Who am I to say this seawall will resist.

Who is to say I am not waving a white flag.

The animal tunnels the ground.

The vertices of two vultures form a cross.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Again, I feel like you’re, in so many of your poems, it’s almost like you’re fighting with yourself, you know?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: Like, “I would like to think I do not need anyone.” You know, you’re not 100% sure, but “I would like to think I don’t,” you know? And then a little bit later, “Who is to say I am not waving a white flag.” You know, like, who’s to say I’m not already asking for help is how I read that. You know, or, I’m not already asking not be alone.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Yeah, exactly. I think that, that there’s a lot of negotiation in this book. And I think that, that that’s why I think the underlying thing is, is myself asking just how to be, how to be at this moment, how to, I don’t know, just sort of, separate from culture, separate from history, separate from religion, politics, all of those things, I, I think I was really trying to strip away all of those questions to a very human level, you know? Those were my concerns then, and they still are very much so.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I found this book a really, like, inner book. To me it felt almost dreamlike in many places. You know, there are poems that are a lot more kind of descriptive and sort of sober. You know, you can sort of follow from one line to the next. But this poem is not one of those, you know? “Say there’s an animal surfacing. / Say it is a fin or a mouth. / Hunger seeps between the rocks.”

That’s just how it opens. And then the last image is so stark: “The vertices of two vultures form a cross.” To access that dream logic, what do you do or what do you keep out?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: It’s funny because I think that you’ve tapped on two directions that I explore in this book. I have the longer narrative poems where the questions are out there and you can see sort of the traces, sort of like a dot to dot of the way that I arrive at whatever I arrive at at the end of the poem. But then these are the poems that are more image-based and they’re short. And there’s really not a lot of them. Most of my poems are over three minutes long and very long lines. And that’s why the publisher had to choose to make the book larger to, so that my book wasn’t all cut up.

Helena de Groot: Huh.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: And so, I do sort of wander and throw the whole drawer (LAUGHS) in.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: But then there’s moments where I sort of get sick of myself and all of those questions and I just say, “You know what?” I think, and as towards the end, you sort of see that the poems get shorter.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: And a little bit more mineral in their essence, because I feel like I’ve scratched around in that ground for too long. And like, now I just, this is what’s leftover in my hands. These little, like, rocks, these little pebbles, you know, these little smaller poems. And so, to access those more imagistic, dreamlike things, I think it very much depends on my mood. I can actually picture myself where I was when I was writing the notes for that poem. And,

Helena de Groot: Where were you?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: I was sitting on a lounge chair overlooking the Gulf of Fonseca here in El Salvador, and I was very literally just observing what was going on around me. And in that same sort of desire to say, you know, what does the landscape or what do these animals around me say about my interior world?, it was sort of like, in my mind, I’m going to take a photograph of what’s happening around me right now and see how that reflects what’s going on inside of me. And that was the way that I created that poem.

Helena de Groot: Okay. I like hearing that, you know, kind of where the interplay is between outside and inside. And then, yeah, when you write “Hunger seeps between the rocks,” I really love that word also that you used, that your poems became more mineral. It’s my new favorite word, I think, to describe the poems. It’s yeah, it’s like elemental. It’s really powerful. It’s harsh also. I mean, this poem, I don’t know, like, it feels ominous, you know? “Hunger seeps between the rocks … the animal hides behind me, a shadow … Who am I to say this seawall will resist … The vertices of two vultures form a cross.” It’s almost like there is a kind of, a series of signs telling you that not all is well in the world. Do you feel like your poems are oracular? Or do they just more to say about you and where you are emotionally?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Well, you know, I’m a fan of divination and tarot and all of that stuff, too. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: And like I said, it’s almost, I can’t help myself, I always want to figure out what the meaning of whatever it is that’s around me. But who or how do we assign these symbolic oracular meanings to these things? And I think, again, it goes back to that sensation of just like, deep penetrating anxiety. And I think that that fear and like that need maybe of not really, you know, having your faith 100% grounded and resolved is what leads us to this constant searching and almost like frenzy of “Please send me a sign,” you know, “so that I can know that what I’m doing is right” or “so that I can know what to do next.” And I think now especially that my, you know, that all of my elders are gone, God, now it’s even worse because now I’m like, oh, not only is it a sign from the world, but it’s a sign from my mother. This is a sign from my grandmother. This is, you know. And I think that there’s like a moment, too, where my father’s sense of reasoning kicks in and says, “You know what, Alex?” My dad had two sayings. He would always say, “Use your head.” And it was so strange because for me, using my head was not my first instinct. I was much more, you know, emotional and, and he was an engineer. And everybody in my house was an artist. And so my dad was like, you know, the square peg. And we loved and feared him. And I think that, so, every now and then, that thought swims up and says, “Use your head.” And so it’s sort of like, “Cut the crap and get to it,” you know?

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Like don’t get lost, you know, swimming around or spinning your wheels of what to do next or what does this mean? You have to pick a path and do it and you can change your mind later, but don’t just keep spinning your wheels. And so there’s this logic, reason, and then there’s like this misplaced hope or faith or fear or expectation that’s constantly rubbing up against each other. And the other saying that my father had was, “Take it easy.” That he would say to us, instead of saying goodbye, he would just say, “All right, take it easy.” And so, I wrote a poem where that’s sort of one of the ending lines. And in a way, I think, well, you know, whether I use my head or my heart or whatever, I have to also give space for, I don’t know, the unknown. And just sort of say, take what comes, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And when your father, he knew, obviously, that he was dying. Did your father have a change of heart about religion?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: My dad never, never say, found his religion. He, he, he was so resolute. He was so like, you know, “Don’t cry for me. It’s all good. You know, I’ve lived a good life. I’m satisfied. You know, I had a good job. I had my children. They’re all doing great things in the world. I traveled. I ate well. I saw, you know, beautiful places.” And it was so strange, you know, just to hear someone say, like, “I’m done.” And I remember, you know, like, talking very briefly about religion at some point with him and he’s like, “If I can’t see it, I don’t believe it.” There was no scientific experiment to prove any of that for him. And so it just didn’t fit in with his, his life, his way of thinking. And I think that that’s what made me so, so uneasy, just seeing my dad so stoically and calmly, you know, facing death. He never complained of pain. He was like, “No, no, no. It’s just a small bother. I don’t have any pain.” But I was the one that he wanted, you know, to have give him the drops of morphine. He didn’t trust anybody else to do it. And it was very strange for me to be the one to be giving him, you know, these drops of oblivion, basically, because that’s what helps you go under, in a way. But I was alone with him. I held his hand minutes before he died. And it was, it was pretty intense because I squeezed his hand thinking that, you know, I wanted him to know that I was there. And Helena, when I looked at his hand, there was like a flap of skin that had raised because he was so dehydrated and his feet were already blue and everything. And I thought, “There’s just no way that I could want him to inhabit this body anymore.” Like, what we had, it’s done. It’s finished. He really lived this life. Like there is no more reason to cling to this human body. Like, he was done. He was done living. Whatever was coming next was going to come, and nobody could hold that back.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, then the fact that you were trusted with the morphine, yeah, it must have been so hard for you to, to have, like, a part in this, you know? Like, to have to, to have to do the thing.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And then, and then contrasted with your mother, who, yeah, you couldn’t do anything for her.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: You, you weren’t there. Nobody, I mean, nobody knew this was going to happen.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Do you see either of them in dreams or in the streets or, you know, just from the corner of your eye, like,

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: I do. I do. I do. Oh, that’s such a great question because I’ve had them so vividly in my mind right now. I think it might have to do with the fact that on this last trip to Miami, I brought back their ashes with me because we’re waiting until all of us can be together so that we can put them in, in the ground, I guess. So I have them in the room just next door. And I think that having their earthly remains, in a way, has seeped into my being. And so I’ve just been having random dreams with them, you know, just very ordinary daily stuff, like watching them clean out the refrigerator and wiping the kitchen counters, you know, very

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: like in a back conversation where I’m not even involved in their conversation, but they’re just talking. But I think the most amazing thing that I had a dream about the other night was that we were in my childhood home. The house was completely decked out in Christmas decorations, unlike they had ever been in life, with all the lights blazing at, in the middle of the night. And I’m walking around the house, turning off all the lights and sort of upset with my parents about they’re spending so much money on all of this electricity, you know, and what are they doing, you know? And as I walk past their bedroom door, I hear them laughing and Christmas music is blasting and I’m like, “It’s October! What are they thinking?” You know. And my mother’s left the refrigerator door open, and there’s a big box of chocolates that’s empty. And so, in a way, for me, those dreams have been messages from them saying, “Don’t worry, you know, we’re doing fine. We are where we are, and we’re okay.”

Helena de Groot: I love that. I have just one last question. What is something that you would like to tell your time capsule you, the one that’s been caught in the amber of this book, you know? What would you like to tell her?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Hmm. I think, I think it’s not something that I’m telling myself. It’s actually something that I’ve had a lot of really good friends tell me right now, because as I said, I’m feeling sort of overexposed and vulnerable because I’m going back and touching all of these moments. And I think that what some of my best friends have told me is, you know, “All the hard work is done. Like, you already lived those moments and you already did the work of writing them.” And rather than worry about how I’m seen, how my parents are seen, really just sort of let yourself enter into the calm of knowing that what is done is done, and, and that even though it’s painful and stirs up stuff, the person that wrote that book, so who I was in that moment, was trying to make sense of a difficult situation, and I was writing it for myself. And I think that whoever comes upon it or reads it, if they find something there that they can relate to or find useful, then that’s great. And I, and I, I don’t know. Like, the message I want to say to myself is just rest. Just, you know, take it easy.

Helena de Groot: Do you want to read one last poem?

Alexandra Lytton Regalado: Sure. Sure, sure.

Helena de Groot: “What My Father Taught Me About Black Holes.”

Alexandra Lytton Regalado:

(READS POEM)

What My Father Taught Me About Black Holes

The ghost of my father haunts me

While he is still alive.

Thank you, he tells me, but

I don’t like poetry.

His body beneath the sheet

Spotlit through the gap-tooth

Shutters. On the bedskirt yellow

Arcs, wheels of urine,

Marks to say do not go

There. Not like the cat that rubs

Its face to say this is mine.

Our tiny white dog, foxlike, but old &

Toothless just a stinking gap

Of a mouth, lifts his leg daily

So we have to lock the room

Where my father sleeps.

My father or a pillow beneath

That white sheet. The rays of light

Enter. They have to rest

Somewhere. When my father says

Goodbye, he says instead, take it

Easy. He eases into the bed,

Takes it, the light falling where it wants.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Alexandra Lytton Regalado is the author of two poetry collections, Matria, which came out from Black Lawrence Press in 2017 and won the St. Lawrence Book Award, and Relinquenda, out from Beacon Press in October of 2022, and selected as a National Poetry Series winner by Reginald Dwayne Betts. She is also a translator, and the codirector of Editorial Kalina, and editor of Puntos de fuga / Vanishing Points, a bilingual anthology of contemporary Salvadoran prose. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose. I’m Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)