Bio: Rene' Janiece

I was six years old when I stepped on a rusty nail while playing outside in the yard. I hopped through the dandelion-dotted grass, up the porch steps, yelling for my mother through the screen door. She arrived, saw the corroded point sticking through the top of my foot, and ran screaming back into the house. If it wasn’t already obvious, it became quite clear: I was on my own. Except for the dandelions that day, dotted with blood, as witness. Except for the gurgling stream at the end of the street, teeming with leeches and tumbling stones. Except for the raccoon balanced on the back fence, the stray cat curled in the neighbor’s garage, the birds that fluttered in the eaves of the attic, listening. Except for the tree outside my bedroom window rustling its leaves at the glass every evening like a lullaby. And words. The awkward first experiences of poetry. I learned to be silent. I made myself small. I knew I didn’t fit. I hid in that dilapidated attic and wrote it all down.

And later, so much later, I was catapulted into the wide Southwest sky. It was the first thing I had seen that was big enough to hold my heavy and bewildered heart. I threw myself at that blue. The California desert where I baked the tears from my bones in the one-hundred-and-ten-degree heat. Arizona’s canyons, Colorado’s mountains. And oh dear, New Mexico’s magic that claimed me! How strange that this all-alone, tradition-less white “girl” would find a home in the dark earthed history of the Pueblo and Spanish and Mexican. In Spanglish and sopapillas and small villages. In pinon and juniper and the round sensual curves of the Sangre de Cristos. In air scented with sage. In a proud-tangled history held in that landscape – something I had never had. And through all of this from - the Time of the Rusty Nail - these words. This writing, when it that I had nothing else. Poetry winding through the wild welcome of the overlooked. And it is still that way today.