Brenna Womer, a Latine person with she/they pronouns, in profile. She has short dark hair and a colorful tattoo on her left shoulder. She's wearing all black against a dark-gray blackground and looking to the left.
Brenna Womer

Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman:

The best visual poetry conveys complexity by making choices about what text to erase, what medium to use to erase it, and what story or emotion to tell in what remains. Brenna Womer’s forthcoming e-chapbook, Dear Mom, does all three skillfully and is fraught with emotion in complicated ways, a daughter looking at her mother’s words and repurposing them to talk to her in a way that she cannot in person. We’re glad to share one of the pieces from the sequence, “26 Sept 86,” with our readers. (Full disclosure: I wrote a blurb for the book.)

Artist’s Note:

The project from which this piece is excerpted, Dear Mom, is an epistolary erasure project of letters written by my mother from her late teens to mid-twenties, during which time she was first married at eighteen, joined the military at nineteen, was stationed in the Philippines and South Korea, divorced her first husband, grappled with her faith, met and married my father, and gave birth to me.

Through the erasure of her often confessional correspondence to her own parents, I render visible some truths that are difficult for me to speak to my mother, with whom I have a fraught and complicated relationship and am currently no-contact. This piece, like all in the collection and including the cover, were hand-collaged and then scanned by me. Dear Mom is forthcoming from petrichor as part of their e-chapbook series.

26 Sept 86

An erasure of a typewritten letter with construction paper and crepe paper (pink, purple, and green), as well as masking tape. There are images of a pink butterfly and a green butterfly wing. Remaining text says "26 Sept 86. Dear Mom: I have grown up a lot"
An erasure of a typewritten letter with construction paper and crepe paper (pink and purple), as well as masking tape. A green butterfly is covered up as well. Remaining text says "but I still don't know How you tell someone you DON'T need them anymore how do I"
An erasure of a typewritten letter with construction paper and crepe paper (pink, purple, green, and light blue), as well as masking tape. A pink butterfly is covered up in part as well. Remaining text says "tell you?"

Brenna Womer (she/they) is a queer, childfree, Latine prose writer, poet, and professor. She’s the author of Unbrained (FlowerSong Press, 2023) and Honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019). Her writing has appeared in North American Review, Indiana Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA program at California State University, Fresno.