johanna e. hall

The first-person lyric is, as far as I can tell, the most self-absorbed art I could have chosen. I find myself spending hours picking apart my memories and emotions. Everything I go through is material. But, of course, there is also everyone.

A love song must have an object of desire. The mother wound must have a mother. Grief must have a dead body. The suicide attempt has a doctor; the sister is still a child; the best friend must be stripped naked, same as the author. Even without names, even weaving people together or inventing them completely, they are there. To “speak my truth” is to invent someone else’s.

My first long-term relationship has coincided with my poetry beginning to be published, and I’m experiencing the strange reality of publicizing love poetry about someone still in my life, rather than someone I never even dated, or someone who left before I had time to edit. Every time a poem made up of them (or rather, myself as someone who looks at them) is published, I realize that the prospective reader will only ever know what I show them. They will meet us, and probably never will again.

I have done this to my lover quite a few times now—they knew what they were getting into, dating a writer. I have to hope that weight is mostly a blessing. And I’ve tried to keep separate my work for an audience and my verses for only us.

But what about the people who didn’t sign up for this? What about family members, high school friends, acquaintances, relationships that are forgotten or broken or juvenile? I’m not even scared of them reading it, but rather of doing them an injustice.

And what of the dead, who cannot even correct you? Richard Siken’s poem “Cover Story” begins, “My boyfriend did not die in 1991. I told a lie and it turned into a fact, forever repeated in my official biography.”

One of the first poems of mine that anyone paid any attention to was entitled “My Mother,” which won the local pride organization’s contest my freshman year. I was praised for my honesty and I remember thinking, How do they know it’s honest? Do they think they know my mother now? My real mother dropped me off at the reading but did not come inside, at my request. I didn’t want her to have to figure out what was true. I didn’t want her to think I was insulting her. I wasn’t a liar, but I didn’t know what I was.

In my high school’s creative writing class, when speaking of one another’s poems, we would never say “you”—only “the speaker.” The speaker was the one with a broken heart or a wasted youth or a failing grade, never us. I relished in this distance. And, of course, I could lie, misquote, portray unfairly, without consequence. But in the real world, your mom is there, waiting in the car outside (if you’re lucky).

Last month, I saw the singer Lucy Dacus perform in her hometown of Richmond, VA. She brought her mother onstage and announced they would sing something together. Perhaps obviously but still completely unexpectedly, they chose “My Mother and I,” a song which begins, “My mother hates her body / We share the same outline” and ends with “All she has given / All I have taken / All is forgiven / All is forsaken.” It can’t have been easy to have her mom hear it at all, much less perform it with her. I will not fall into the aforementioned trap of believing every story an artist tells is the literal personal truth, but it was at least a truth, told together. Watching this profound lack of distance, I was struck with how much bravery and trust in her own art it surely took to get to this moment. I do not take for granted this vulnerability, this willingness to portray the incomplete and the years-old. I’m not sure I have it, but there’s still time.

In contrast, Alison Bechdel’s mother, upon reading her daughter’s memoir, responded only with, “It coheres.” None of the embraces and harmonies of Lucy and her mother, but still, in my mind, a perfect response to art about—that speaks over—you (and perhaps not so different after all). I come back to that when I am telling a story: does it cohere? The person I am constructing for a page or two will be received by an audience who will only ever know what I show them. So is it a good story, is it worth showing? Those portrayed may never perform it with me, but is it worth performing? I’ve tried to stay true to that in these new poems.

orange juice has just published two, each defamatory in a different way. Originally published in the albatross zine, “in which i explain the adhesive property of water” weaves together my fifth grade music teacher, my middle school crush, a boy I kissed in high school, and my current partner. Strange company I’ve forced them to keep. “In which Anne Carson tells me that understanding isn’t what grief is about,” originally written for Escapril 2025, is about wishing my dog was dead. Only a little bit. At least he can’t read.

The title of “Another Icarian Manic-Depressive,” found in sardine can collective‘s first can, tries to be self-aware about the tired bipolar analogies, but the poem itself relishes in them. I can only pretend to be a person, but I am an image—being inside a poem makes you one. Perhaps it is a comfort to anyone twisted into my work that I will always do worse to myself. I have an elderly neighbor—although I would never call her that to her face—and I dance with her.

I’m honored to be included in In Praise of Despair: A Disability Pride Anthology. “Luckiest Dyke in the Ward” is about my time in a psychiatric hospital, but it’s also about someone else’s. Someone I have not spoken to since and probably never will again. What have I done to her? Will she forever be known to you from what was probably the worst part of her life? Will her legacy be as someone loosely quoted? Well, no. She is unnamed. You don’t even know if she’s real. (The same is true of, has been done to, the speaker.)

Which brings us to the real reason I’ve written all this: to introduce my poem “Junior High Trinity,” published in Antlers Vol. III, which you can preorder now. It terrifies me. I’ve ruined five people (if you include myself and the girl I met at a bar). It is true and it is a story. What cannot fit into three pages means I have lied by omission. I have summarized, been presumptuous, spilled secrets. The subject of the third stanza has assured me it’s beautiful, which I guess is like saying it coheres when you’re portrayed favorably in the work. Or perhaps it’s something different altogether.

C. Francis Fisher, reviewing Siken, writes, “As readers, must we take the writer at their word? . . . There is truth and lie, myth and reality; perhaps it is all truth because we need to say it.” I know now people were trying to compliment my vulnerability when they said honesty. I tear myself open out of necessity. Sometimes lying is the closest you can come to the truth. Sometimes you’ll never have something you could look them in the eye with. Whether coherent, beautiful, or neither, all of this is yours, the reader’s. You don’t know any of us (even if you happen to be one of my subjects/victims). Just my art. Which is more and less of me than I’d like.

❤ Johanna