Poppies - brightly colored flowers with four to six petals.
Ornament, food, opiate.
Tall, showy, delicate.
Growing in fields, deserts, cottage gardens, their faces to the sun.
Scarlet poppies - remembrance for soldiers lost in war.
Two, long-stemmed, leaning together.
Think of POPPIES as metaphor. Four to six petals become four to six questions. The questions lean together as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, black-stamened, conspicuous, lacy. Here, in the questions and answers of interview, writers and artists will come together, like so many poppies, and brilliant, colorful, tempestuous scenarios will occur.
Ornament, remembrance, opiate.
Icelandic, Nepalese, Welsh.
Different every time.
The first interview for "The Poppy" will be with Yolanda J. Franklin. Poet, teacher, PhD candidate, and third generation, north Florida native. Yolanda's work is forthcoming or has appeared in Sugar House Review, Crab Orchard Review’s American South Issue, The Hoot & Howl of the Owl Anthology of Hurston Wright Writers’ Week, SPECS: Journal of Arts & Culture’s Kaleidoscopic Points Issue, and Kweli Journal. Her awards include a nomination for a 2012 Pushcart Poetry Prize, a 2012 Cave Canem fellowship, and several scholarships, including a summer at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Indiana Writer’s Week, and Colrain Poetry Manuscript Workshop. Her collection of poems, Southern Pout, was a finalist for the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Award. She is a graduate of Lesley University's MFA Writing Program and presently a doctoral candidate at Florida State University. Yolanda's north Florida sunshine will break through any day now. Faces to the sky!
My interview with Yolanda originally appeared in HOTHOUSE MAGAZINE and is archived here at THUNDER ON A THURSDAY. And to read about the decision to transition The Poppy: An Interview Series to Hothouse, visit my post, The Poppy Becomes a Hothouse Flower.