Just One Thing with Dylan McNulty-Holmes

Dylan McNulty-Holmes’ poem “Ode to My Preposterous Tiny Moustache’s First International Flight” is a glorious celebration of a body moving through both space and into identity. Here he shares just one thing about the piece:

“While I was putting the finishing touches on this poem, I read this brilliant conversation between Jane Hirschfield and Kaveh Akbar, in which Hirschfield says that the art we practice needs to contain our ‘experience of the immeasurable.’ I think there are a few glimpses of something adjacent to this scattered throughout my poem, but thinking through this prism made me realize what element was missing. It was ‘the monumental shadow of improbability’—of being a body hurled through the sky; of sprouting a moustache for the first time in my thirties; of finding my way to the process of transition after so many years; of wondering how many versions of myself might never have arrived at this answer to so many questions I’d been asking myself. It just needed a small but explicit nod to that particular precipice amongst all the celebration. This poem is a homecoming, and I hope you enjoy it.”