By Dominic Wiharso
Illustration by Li Yin
As I launched into a lengthy question, Renee Morales, CC ’25, gently interrupted me, apologizing as she lifted her phone to capture a moment. We were perched on a bench in Riverside Park, sipping overpriced Blue Bottle coffee, when a corgi—her favorite dog breed—ambled over with a comically large branch clenched in its teeth, looking up at her as though she were its rightful owner. Renee basked in the fleeting intimacy of the encounter, snapping a photo before resuming our conversation. I was struck by the grace of her focus—her attention to both me and the park’s rhythm felt so harmonized that I realized we likely experience the world through entirely different frequencies.
A multi-hyphenate artist-poet-philosopher, Renee inhabits a rare attunement to the world's subtle rhythms—a sensitivity that the world reflects back to her. This perceptiveness shapes her writing—thoughtfully cogent yet disarmingly visceral. As she spoke about the sensorial delight of the park at dusk, she reflected on her own state of being: “I’m feeling the bench. The wind is blowing through my hair. And I’m sitting with you. And the temperature is perfect. And I feel very calm and very happy and very full. Or if I feel rage, I feel it fully. And it’s kind of an erotic rage—I feel it on the tips of my toes, or the scabs of my legs, or something like that.” She paused, laughing as though she’d gone too far, but even in her restraint, her words carried the lyrical sensibility she lives by.
For Renee, poetry is a vessel for the erotic—a term she approaches through Audre Lorde’s expansive framework in Uses of the Erotic. Lorde reclaims eroticism as embodied knowledge, creativity, and emotional depth, challenging its reduction to libido. This redefinition, steeped in Lorde’s identity as a Black woman, critiques how patriarchal systems have historically erased the emotional and sensual intelligence of marginalized bodies. Renee’s work emerges from this lineage, weaving the erotic into the fabric of her writing.
Lorde’s intersection of the erotic and racialized identity deeply resonates with Renee. She described the inescapability of her body as a racialized entity, yet also the transformative solitude of inhabiting it away from the world’s gaze. In that liminal space, she reclaims pleasure as an everyday ritual. “Imagine yourself,” she said, “pleasuring yourself in this room. I’m having a relationship with my body. Pleasuring yourself can also be like physical and sexual, but it could be like, I'm watching my favorite TV show.” For Renee, self-pleasure is expansive—both sensual and nurturing, encompassing comfort and touch. It’s about feeling deeply and resisting the impulse to over-define those sensations. Her poetry, she explained, eschews static mind-body binaries, capturing a fluid stream of consciousness.
This philosophy extends far beyond the bedroom. The library, she mused, is another “deeply sexy space.” “It’s full of bodies who don’t want to be there, but who are there anyway. It sucks, but it’s beautiful to catch someone’s eye across the table, size each other up, and then go back to what you’re doing.” These fleeting, unspoken intimacies counteract the oppressive expectations that dominate daily life. For Renee, even the most mundane spaces can hold a brief, grounding pleasure, reminding us of tender, unspoken connections.
In Renee’s poetry, the grammar of pleasure is refracted through the prism of the “I.” When I asked her about the works currently shaping her thoughts, she named Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal, a collection that reimagines Caliban from The Tempest to confront the politics of Caribbean sexuality and familial violence. Renee highlighted how Sinclair centers the self, “asserting the ‘I,’ asserting the racialized and feminized ‘I.’” She reflected on the fragility of this pronoun, asking whether the “I” in poetry represents the poet, the reader, both, or something more elusive. For Renee, the “I” is never fixed but a site of negotiation, constantly shifting its contours.
Who is the authorial, biographical “I” in Renee Morales’ poetry? Raised in Hialeah, Florida—dubbed the most Cuban city in the U.S., with over 80% of its population tracing roots to Cuba—Renee grew up immersed in a rich Caribbean cultural landscape. Her mother, who immigrated to Miami from Cuba in the early 2000s, instilled a deep connection to her heritage. As third-culture children, Renee and I found common ground in the struggles of navigating public school systems that often demanded we reshape our voices to align with rigid academic expectations. She recalled a pivotal moment when her AP English Language teacher sat her down to explain the semicolon, describing her early writing as a stream of unbroken run-on sentences with little punctuation.
Renee described her approach to conventional grammar as both playful and deliberate. “There are elements of conventional English grammar that I want to repurpose—or that I just enjoy repurposing,” she explained. Renee reflected on how the fluidity of language shapes her poetic practice, pushing back against rigid conventions. She recounted moments when people criticized her for using words “incorrectly,” noting how fickle and ever-changing the English language is. “We’re constantly inventing our own ways of understanding each other,” she observed. For her, poetry serves as an invitation to redefine words and phrases. She takes pleasure in spelling words wrong, capitalizing letters in unconventional places, or making adjectives into verbs, fully aware of the discomfort it can provoke in readers. What happens to a poem when pretty is transformed into: “I do pretty; I am doing pretty”?
Even the ellipses in her poetry are imbued with personal meaning, drawing inspiration from her mother’s text messages, where ellipses often replaced commas or question marks, trailing off into pauses pregnant with meaning. “It’s really fun starting a poem with an ellipsis,” Renee said. “I'm making the reader experience this absence of language. I'm making them sit with me in this space before I actually start talking.” These choices are more than stylistic—they are an invitation to engage with the silences and ruptures that shape her voice.
When pressed about the role of time in her writing, Renee revealed a deeper preoccupation with its passage, particularly in the context of ancestry and generational ties. She spoke of the “slipperiness” of these connections—how someone could be bound to her through lineage yet exist in a time before hers, their life overlapping or influencing what follows. Poetry, she explained, offers a unique form through which to manipulate and play with these concepts of time. She finds punctuation—commas, ellipses, brackets, and parentheses—particularly evocative in shaping temporal flow. Brackets and parentheses, for instance, serve as interruptions, moments where she asks the reader to pause before returning to the narrative. Renee is especially drawn to the symbolism of a half-parenthesis—an open mark without closure—representing time or ideas left unfinished, lingering in the space of possibility.
Renee crafted a poem that blended multiple tenses, deliberately mixing them to explore time’s malleability and her own tendency to write in the present tense. “I’m writing about a memory in the future tense,” she explained, “saying ‘I will do this’ and what that means of thinking of something that's happened to you in the future and what can change.” This approach reflects her fascination with revisiting memories or stories she has been told, not simply to recount them but to reimagine how they might have unfolded.
I wondered if Renee’s perspective was rooted in a spiritual dimension—if there was a link between her reflections on time, ancestry, and faith. Central to her poetic vision is Santería, a syncretic religion born from the fusion of Yoruba spiritual practices and Catholicism during the era of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean. Growing up in Miami, Renee witnessed the fraught perceptions of Santería among white Catholic Cubans, many of whom dismissed it as “demon worship,” a reaction she identified as deeply racist. For her, Santería is not just a religious practice but a vital cultural force that shapes Cuban identity, especially as a means for Afro-Caribbeans in Cuba to maintain their identity amidst oppression. The religion’s embodied rituals—music, dance, and communal celebration—serve as both a release of pain and a way to preserve cultural memory.
Musicality, especially rhumba, plays a central role in her creative process. Renee described how the controlled chaos of Cuban rhythms inspires her writing, particularly in a poem she crafted after the rhumba song La Gozadera by Yoruba Andabo. The song’s layered rhythms and messages of self-reliance mirrored the tension she sought to capture in her work. She described the poem as “me trying to write in a controlled way to mimic an uncontrolled experience.”
To close, I turn to what often precedes Renee's poems: the title. One title that influences her work is Morgan Parker's Magical Negro #217: Diana Ross Finishing a Rib in Alabama, 1990s, which masterfully creates an incongruence between the title and the poem’s content. In her creative process, she asks herself, "Where does this poem start? Where does it end? And how do I invite someone to begin reading it?" If I could, I’d give this article a similarly expressive title, but Renee Morales’ name alone is enough.
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