Last Night from Memory, by Lila Hogue

Poetry, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

It’s the feeling you get when trees full of green, lush leaves, look black against an oil pastel sky. It’s the way you remember something beautiful that causes you pain, that feels bittersweet, but also makes the windows of your soul cry. I have always had a complicated relationship with pain and memory. I remember my late alcoholic father screaming at me when I was a child and I remember tuning out his roaring thunder and getting lost in his beautiful river green irises. I remember being scared to wake up my mother but finding her so breathtaking with her eyes closed. To me, beauty and pain are entangled sisters and they hold hands all over the place. I can’t help but to feel the tender undertow of beauty that accompanies pain. It’s a teacher, a preacher and an alchemist all in one, three in one conditioner and shampoo. I think pain and memory reveal the deepest truths. And these words are glimpses of my raw candor that will maybe feel true to you. Last Night from Memory.

Lila Hogue, who ultimately identifies as a full time dreamer, currently resides in the country metropolitan hills of Nashville, TN. She grew up in the dirty south of north Alabama and spent every summer outside with her five siblings, learning to fish and learning to live. After graduating from The University of North Alabama in 2019 with an English Literature degree, she moved her honey suckle self to the big city to be around a more condensed population of creative minds. Lila is a writer, a visual artist and an aspiring actor. She married her soul mate in the spring of last year, who is also an artist, and they spend all of their free time brainstorming new artistic concepts.