Me Sandwich

Aerik Francis

Interview by C. VanWinkle
August 9, 2023

What was the prompt you responded to? Would you describe it for me?

I received a photograph of perhaps one person, perhaps three people… very likely one person. The title was “Human Sandwich.” Basically, it had one person in the middle, who was sepia or brown-colored, and then there were two people on either end, who I suppose were the bread of the sandwich, and they were grayscale. There was an eroticism to this picture. It felt like the person in the picture was receiving some pleasure in this sandwich. They didn't have their eyes to the camera; they were up or removed. It looked like, I don't even care that the camera is there, this is my human sandwich.

What did you think of it?

I thought it was really cool. My first inclination was that I wanted to recreate it. I wanted to see exactly how the sandwich was made and make myself into the sandwich. So I started taking pictures, which is really cool because I don't consider myself a photographer. It's just something that happens, I guess. So it was cool to play around with that before I got into what I consider my craft to be, which is the writing.

I assume most writers don't take selfies as part of their process to prepare to write. I think it's really cool that that’s part of how you experienced the work.

Everything goes through writing to me, specifically poetry. Pretty much everything I do is poetry. I find poetry to be very multimedia and very inviting of all sorts of different genres and mediums that to play with, so that I can bring it back to the writing. On one hand, it was not totally my usual practice, but on another hand, it felt really natural.

Had you done this type of thing before?

I have made pictures that overlap transparent figures, so it looks like there are two people in one time and place. One of the things that really attracted me to this photograph is that, even though nothing is explicitly shown, I got the impression that this person was naked. And that was also a challenge for me because I felt like I should be naked in my own photo, but I don’t usually take naked pictures of myself for any reason! [laughs] That brought me to a different place in my mind, a different place in my craft, to realize that I have to bare myself and display a different kind of vulnerability to even enter the piece.

I think that's the key there, that vulnerability. I appreciate that it’s something that you were drawn to experience. So how did you get to the actual writing? How did that start?

The writing was tricky because there were a number of different inclinations of how I might start. I took my pictures, but then the question was: Am I writing based on my own pictures or based on the prompt itself? And what would be the difference? And of course there was this idea of the sandwich: What would it mean for me to make a sandwich of myself? What would it be to make a sandwich of the poem? That was a question I lingered on for a while.

I initially started like I do any writing project. I didn't have any idea about the form or the content; I just had to get whatever ideas or free associations that I had onto paper. It ends up being just a block of prose, and then when you're done you pick out the ingredients of the sandwich.

I see. And I noticed that you wrote a triple sonnet, which I’d never heard of before, but is a sandwich itself. There are two ends and a middle.

Yes! That was exactly my thought process. I considered writing three-line stanzas or having the whole piece just be three lines. But I decided that if I’m making this sandwich, I want a big sandwich. I want something that's going to fill me up. So what is a poetry form that's going to be big and juicy, that I’m going to get a full meal out of, but at the same time, still be contained?

There’s a poet that I admire, who is actually a friend of mine, named Dorothy Chan. Her signature poem is the triple sonnet. I'd never written one before, but I had recently read one of hers called “Triple Sonnet Because Boy, You're Starstruck and I'm a Wonder.” I love this poem because it has that braggadocio, but it's also so sprawling, and it's shifting, but at the same time it maintains the narrative throughline. I found the form to be really capacious. It’s like, this is a song, but it's a long song, and we're going to go through a couple of different turns before we get to the end. But it's still contained. I thought it would be a really great opportunity for me to cut my teeth on this form. And I think it worked out.

I think so too! How does this piece relate to the rest of your work?

That's a great question. For me, form is a container. It's like a glass of water. The water is the substance, and you can pour it into whatever container, and maybe it's half-full or totally full or whatever, but it's all about the container. So I guess that's where I landed with the triple sonnet. It’s the only one I've written, so the form stands pretty unique compared to the other stuff I do. But in terms of the thematics, I think it fits right in. I tend to write about bodies and politics – that’s the name of my manuscript: “BODYPOLITIC.”

The way I would describe this poem might be trying to have a different relationship with a mirror. Maybe you're less concerned with the exclusive reflection and more concerned about the total package: the reflection, and you, and whatever is in between. That creates the sandwich, right? This poem allowed me to really think about what my body is doing in space and time, and what is happening when this Me Sandwich appears in the mirror. In that sense, it's really about coming to a kind of acceptance of yourself and your body and your image. One of the lines is “I make the best out of what I have.” You know, you're hungry. Here's some food. How can I dress this up to really make it a meal for me? How can I dress myself up so that I can be my own meal rather than being eaten by other people, being made by other people, letting all that autonomy rest outside of myself?

You sent me this piece as a page to be read and an audio file to be listened to. I read it first and I thought of the first-person narrator as myself. But then when I listened to it, the Me in the poem wasn’t me anymore; it was you! Hearing you read it made me think it was your experience, not mine. It was interesting how that flipped. Do you consciously write for something to be heard or read? Or both?

Both, for sure. I consider myself a poet who is very much in tune and wanting to maintain oral tradition. When I perform my poems, I usually try to memorize them so that they're held in my body, so when I share them, I can focus on looking at people. I can focus on interacting and exchanging energy. Part of my craft is wondering how the words feel in the air and sound in the ear, in addition to how they look on a page. That’s very much what was going on as I was writing this.

I think that also informs some of these lines. The very first line is “Make me a sandwich,” and to my ear that is a phrase that holds a lot of weight and history. It feels like a patriarchal imperative, like “Make me a sandwich…” and then in brackets, “[woman]” or something like that. Because of the strength of that phrase, it became important for me to not only use it, but also to deconstruct it and to refigure it. I think there's a lot of that going on with the sounds of the poem.

Plus, there are a lot of poets who are very rigid. You know, “A sonnet has 14 lines, a sonnet has a volta, a sonnet has dada-dada-da rules.” Those are important to be sure, but the essential thing about a sonnet is that the word comes from Italian, and it basically translates to “little song.” So for me, it's important to have that musicality, regardless of whatever the rules are. That's also something that you can really hear in the ear: the rhyme, the wordplay, all of those things that not only carry forth meaning, but also make it fun to listen to.

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in this poem sounds good out loud and feels good to pronounce. I appreciate that as another way to experience it. Is the narrator of this piece you? Or not necessarily?

I want to say “Yes and…” because this is one of those essential poetry questions that gives it an extra level of mystery. On one hand, yes, most things I write (if not everything I write) is me. I'm the speaker. On the other hand, there's a little bit of fun in imagining that the speaker is not me, that the speaker is someone else. I think for this particular poem, it works.

When you were talking about the difference between the page experience and the auditory experience, you mentioned the switch of pronoun. That was something that I was thinking about because there’s a You that shows up for a little bit, so my question is the reverse: Is the You me, or is the You the reader? I landed on the idea that the speaker is telling this poem to the mirror. So the Me and the You are the speaker. Everything is the speaker. But what that means is that the audience is the Me and the You, and the speaker is the Me and the You. There's really an opening up that happens here when it comes to speakers and readers in that interplay, especially because it's an internal dialogue. It's like a mirror. Given that it's so specific and so interior, it becomes that much more easily generalizable. Ironically, maybe.

That's awesome. This is a really interesting topic, though it’s also possibly confusing. Plus, we're both looking at ourselves and each other on computer screens. So many layers of mirrors happening here!

That’s exactly it! This experience right here on Zoom is very much what I was going for. I'm simultaneously looking at you and me at the same time.

By the way, I'm really impressed with your sandwich vocabulary. Different kinds of sandwiches, ingredients of sandwiches, qualities of sandwiches. Did you do research or were you already a sandwich expert?

[laughs] Once again, it's a “Yes and…” Yeah, I did research, but I was already a big sandwich fan. I eat them frequently and so it already felt like my wheelhouse to talk about them. One of my first questions was, “If I were a sandwich, what kind of sandwich would I be?” And that’s also where the variety in the poem comes in, because I don’t know – it all depends on the day. If you were to ask me today, I would say ice cream sandwich. That was my first inclination, so I thought I should invite a whole bunch of other sandwiches in. and one thing.

I was thinking about how sandwiches are very American. I think they were invented in Europe, but they really caught hold in America. I was looking at the history, and when peanut butter was invented… Oh my gosh. Americans wanted peanut butter and anchovy sandwiches, peanut butter and bologna sandwiches, everything with bread and peanut butter. I just found it funny how very American sandwiches are. At the same time, given that my personal background comes from a lot of different places, I didn't want it to exclusively be American. I wanted to invite in those debates, like is a burrito a sandwich? Is a taco a sandwich? I don't have an answer to those debates, but I do want to invite them into the umbrella. But if anyone were to say that something in my poem wasn’t a sandwich, I would say “O-kay.”

Is there anything else that you would like to touch on that I didn't ask about?

Yeah, I want to give shout-outs. I did research to prepare for this poem, which included reading other poets, and I want to shout out to them because I think it's all important. I already shouted out Dorothy Chan and the triple sonnet. Another poet that I want to shout out is Ama Codjoe, who wrote this book called “Bluest Nude.” I started reading it earlier this year and I keep returning to it. The book is very much about sitting with your nudity in a lot of different aspects. I went to her poem called “Primordial Mirror.” It's on poets.org if you want to check it out. It's about being naked and looking in the mirror, so I very much got my process from Ama Codjoe. I also want to mention one other poet, and that’s Chen Chen. The poem is “Summer” and it’s on the Poetry Foundation website. It just opened me up to thinking about sandwiches poetically and whimsically while also taking them seriously. Chen is such a good poet at being simultaneously playful and devastating. And I love that. I don't think this is a devastating poem, but I also feel like there’s a space for contemplation about serious matters and we're not just talking about, you know, Croque Madame and Monte Cristo.

Now that you have participated in this project, what's your advice to someone else getting started with Bait/Switch?

Just get into it! Really just throw your whole self into the prompt and see what happens. Play around. Maybe do some re-creation, maybe write some lines yourself before you get into whatever medium it is. And start early. I got the prompt and just went headfirst, and it took me about a week to put everything together. You know, you look at a poem, even a longer poem, and you think, “Oh that took 10 minutes.” So I'm sure it's the same for all the other artists. Just start early. Don't play around with the deadline, just do your thing.

Call Number: C103VA | C105PP.fraMe

Aerik Francis is a Queer Black & Latinx poet based in Denver, CO. They are the author of the poetry chapbook MISEDUCATION (NDR 2023), named the winner of the 2022 New Delta Review Chapbook Prize, and poetry chapbook BODYELECTRONIC (Trouble Department 2022). Check out their website phaentompoet.com for more fun poetry stuff & things