Former Flame Fridays - Clem Flowers

11/29/24

Love this cover image that Clem made! Welcome to the end of November.

You were featured in volume 2, what has happened since?

Ooh! Well… got to work with some great presses to release a couple new chapbooks  –  most recently,  KUDZU (for those looking for sad, lonely, horny queer poems set to my life growing up in the Deep South) via Cowboy Jamboree Press,  I KNOW NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT, (a collection I made to help deal with my insomnia & just really finding a true love of the beauty of the night) via Bullshit Lit.

And my first full length collection, i've been going thru some things (a broad span of my life, youth spent in hospitals, bad relationships, heartbreak, abuse, self-loathing, self imposed exile, functional alcoholism, finding true love, paych ward visit, then finally finding a little patch of peace and happiness for myself and those I love) via kith books. 

On the personal life front, got to bear witness & be a support system for my sweetheart Moon, as he started transitioning and is doing HRT and is living life full of gender euphoria. 

Beyond that, just trying to enjoy life. :)

Purchase Volume 2

Walled In (I Love This Game)


season of death brings the new and there is beauty in the decay out along our blowing blue hills perched down below godless peaks that turn the deer sideways & we light fires to help the night along but the way it rips along the snow reminds me of when I was a kid & my mom brought me to watch her friend's daughter perform in Nutcracker Suite & there was this awkward tilt of beauty & it's the same I feel now knowing your head is on my shoulder as we watch the wind take away the ends of decay off to dance along the wave of moonlight that managed to sneak by the farmhouse roof as we let the cold air stoke the flames in our hearts as our bliss threatens to raze the valley


Controlled burn 
                             Controlled burn
the night now belongs
                                         to the flame of rose peaks






                       the fog holds hard

What/who inspired Walled In (I Love This Game)? How does it fit into your style/body of work?

Walled In (I Love This Game) had it's title appear after - combination of a phrase I saw on a postcard tacked up to a wall in an antique store, as well as the catchphrase of the NBA in the 90s. (I grew up on a lot of indie and alt. rock, so non-sequitors as titles are my Heaven lol.)

The poem itself? I wrote it not too long after going on a walk with my husband on a mountain trail and reading on one of those fascinating markers that a lot of big sweeping spots that have luckily avoided the thrasher the bulldozer the backhoe etc etc about how this spot used to be a hangout for mining company people and their families as they went to and from the minded finding a place to eat and relax away from company town. 

Then that night, we sat on our balcony, holding hands, watching fireworks, just enjoying the moment. 

Poem came up before i went to bed. :)

I think it fits in with my work in the sense that I love to try to set a mood & a scene –  my biggest poetry influences are Frank O'Hara, Emily Dickinson, and Hoa Nguyen, and I really admire how they can build this masterful, sprawling scene with such ease - and I really like the way light just can play with how your mood and memories in/ of a situation. 

Why Troublemaker Firestarter? What compels you to submit your work? Why be a writer at the end of the world?

I love y'all's aesthetics and cheery pragmatism (the world is a cruel fucker, so why not be kind & be honest with yourself if no one else, and just appreciate the gentle beauty all around you.) 

I just feel compelled to submit my poems to places such as your lovely publication because I'm not gonna ever claim to be a, like, Audre Lorde or Mary Oliver with some life altering profound experience via the written word, but I like to think there's a world for some bittersweet, nostalgic pastoral works. :)

As to why write? The world sucks. 

But that doesn't mean you aren't allowed to enjoy yourself and find some sense of wonder in the arts. :)

Who are your current favorite writers?

Oooooh… nat raum, Imogen Binnie, Grady Hendrix, Kimberly Wolf, Dawn Lundy Martin, John Darnielle, Nikki Giovanni, Ocean Vuong, dre levant, atlas st. cloud, Julianna Huxtable, Ly Faulk, Carl Phillips, Tommy Blake, Quinton Li, Joy Harjo, and Barlow Adams. 

Are you a troublemaker, a firestarter, a heartbreaker, a lucky duck, a devil, a terror, or sad and horny?

Lucky duck, always always. :)

Where can people find you 😈?

I'm basic lol - clem_flowers on twitter & clemflowers.bsky.social on Bluesky (really need to set up a website one of these days 😅)

What would you want the lovely readers of Substack to do?

Be kind to one another. And a piece of advice from Agent Dale Cooper that I live by:

Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it. Don't wait for it. Just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot black coffee.