Danielle Evennou is an ex-cheerleader from Central New Jersey. Her poems have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Objet d’Art, and Xenith. Danielle is the recipient of a Young Artist Grant, and her first chapbook Queen of Tuesday is slated for release in Summer 2010.
DCCAH: Why did you move to DC?
DE: “[I] moved to Washington, DC to escape the big hair of New Jersey and to pursue a career in domestic social policy.”
DCCAH: What is the one quote you live by?
DE: “Don’t pick them up, don’t lay them down, ” the West African Philosopher as explained by Maya Angelou.
Below are two poems by Evennou:
To My Cousin’s Husband
In the future,
there will be no books.
Smash his Kindle.
-Danielle Evennou
Big Bear Café
1700 1st Street, NW
I stand in line for coffee, long as Sunday.
Examine the children of high paid hippies
watch them write their names in sidewalk chalk, dirt-caked
as they sip from biodegradable cups.
Cliques of my hipster friends smoke Marlboro Reds.
Inside the scent seeps into wood floors and clothes
of stylish baristas in with Baltimore bangs.
Their monthly reading series feels the most like
Manhattan, I think it’s the silent clapping.
Steel bucket of beer sweats to experiments
that amuse both me and the academics.
When it rains, recline on the velvet sofa,
green like my parents’ shag carpeting. I stay,
linger to the tune of “Yellow Submarine.”
I imagine men shirtless with leather vests,
smell their latté-dipped beards, I sip espresso
pinky up. Lovers look lusty under their
aviators. Resident cub serves cupcakes
behind the counter, speakers full of Eartha
induce an Eiffel Tower, a semblance of
International Rendezvous, refuge for
locals and their Labradors, Wreck and Rufus.
I savor the reality, grounds’ wet grit.
-Danielle Evennou
Danielle, the title of your first book
sounds so much like you.
Keep up the good work.