Interview:  

Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem? 

I chose Team Taylor as my poetry deals heavily with religious iconography and trauma, but also for Taylor's reverence for cultural elements within poetry. I'm intentional about highlighting the dialectal and cultural traits of my birthplace, southern Appalachia, in my work, and long for my poems to find homes in places where those traits can be displayed and celebrated with the brevity and grace they deserve.

How do you think the motif of the vulture works with the borrowed hymn lines? Why did you make that choice?

This is an interesting question. The particular recording of I Need Thee Every Hour I listened to growing up (and while drafting this poem) belongs to Ella Fitzgerald, who has a voice like a warm embrace to me. The melody she crafts in her version of the song sweeps multiple octaves with a clarity that's absolutely insane, and whenever I hear her sing I picture a bird in flight, gliding and writhing in the sky with an effortlessness akin to what Ella Fitzgerald displays. There were two elements of her recording, though, that led me to toy with the image of vultures in this poem: while Fitzgerald's singing is sweeping and rolling, the singing of her background singers is particularly staccato, moreso in the verses themselves rather than the chorus or refrain. This led to the "pecking" imagery we see with the vultures "pecking away" throughout the poem. Secondly, one particular background singer utilizes a deep, cutting bass register throughout the song, which underlines the tenderness of the song with a darker, chilling tone. I wanted this to translate as a sort of darkness within the poem-- this "need" that Fitzgerald sings about is genuine, and it is a longing discussed widely within Christianity, yet there's a more carnal, sinister undertone to that "need" when I myself reflect upon it as someone who was expelled from the institution of the Church. This "need" becomes a hunger that has the power to destroy. One "needs" this faith, this religion, this church, etc.-- and that craving has the power to dictate one's thoughts, actions, behaviors, ideologies, relationships, and so on. This "need" is desperate, and if that desperation consumes, becomes parasitic. Many people whom I love remain engrossed by the institution of the Church. This poem highlights a hunger in them that can never be satisfied by that institution. Yet this poem also highlights my continued reverence to and belief in a God-- I found Them in the downpour, rather than in the Church all these vultures keep flocking to. It's a call to reject organized religion in favor of a personal connection, a call to embrace the truth of the Self instead of the dogma of an orthodoxy.

There's a back and forth in this poem both in the form and in the language, why is that necessary for this poem? 

This back and forth that you've highlighted is, in essence, highlighting the rift we see between the intrinsical "faith" and the dogmatic "religion". This poem is a narrative of the "vultures", yes, these blindly loyal religious devotees (aka "the Devoted") who pick apart God's message of love in order to push their organizational doctrines, of which are deeply injurious and favor only the most privileged out there; that said, it is also a deeply personal prayer, that of the speaker of the poem finding their own solace in the original message of love from God, and confessing how they once fell into this pattern of living the vultures promoted. I wanted both the form and the language of the poem to visualize this rift we see between faith and religion, but also this rift we see between the speaker and the community of vultures they'd once considered themself part of, but also this rift we see between the speaker and God Themself, of which the speaker is actively attempting to mend, drawing nearer to God and further from the organization that claims to speak in Their name.