{"id":8986,"date":"2025-04-30T23:58:18","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T05:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=8986"},"modified":"2025-04-30T23:58:18","modified_gmt":"2025-05-01T05:58:18","slug":"hugs-hunny-and-the-outlaw-bible-of-american-poetry","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=8986","title":{"rendered":"Hugs Hunny and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Alessandra Nysether-Santos<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">If I was a drag queen, I would be\u00a0<em>Hugs Hunny<\/em>\u2014<br>maybe what I mean is\u2026 one of my many selves\u00a0<em>is\u00a0<\/em>Hugs Hunny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">She\u2019s the one who, at a high school party, was hand-feeding baby carrots to drunk teenagers,\u00a0<br>then found a freshman sprawled in the damp grass and checked his breathing when he<br>wouldn\u2019t respond to her melodic: \u201cHello, boy in the camo Carhartt, are you dead?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">And when he stirred and said all watery and wrong, \u201cI\u2019m fine,\u201d as she checked the<br>pulse of his wrist, she asked if he wanted her to get help\u2014<br>a veritable chariot to pull him in from the South Jersey rural darkness, dotted<br>with sparse house lights scattered among farms below a sky too starry to believe\u00a0<em>this\u00a0<\/em>is Jersey\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">and he said no, she asked if she could bless him\u2014I\u2019d recently been ordained online and, she mentioned, I could also preside over funerals at sea\u2014<br>he asked, \u201cI was baptized; is that okay?\u201d And she said, \u201cOf course,\u201d and blessed him.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">We (he and her, but also I) never talked again after that, and such is the power of Hugs Hunny.<br>She would get drunk and sit in someone\u2019s closet, reading\u00a0<em>The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry<\/em>, annotating and marveling at the sparkling lines by d.a. levy, Tupac, and all those desperado voices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">She would suddenly emerge from a pantry, pause the contentious country music to stand on a table and proclaim: \u201cI will now make a State of the Party Address!\u201d<br>And by god, she would, blending scraps of poetry and menthol cigarettes and regurgitated YOLOs to incite those warbling voices to song and chant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">That outlaw with her heart on her sleeve who always ended up falling in love or falling asleep early in an armchair or under a bench.<br>How did she always wake up just in time to tenderly care for the too-drunk and the sick?\u00a0<br>That sweet girl who cleaned up the red plastic cups and fed even strangers the bounty of baby carrots found in the crisper of someone\u2019s mom\u2019s fridge,<br>she\u2019s delicately pressed between the pages of a lost and well-loved copy of\u00a0<em>The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry<\/em>, and I hope the notes in the margins are still being swept by thrilled fingertips, somewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n&nbsp;\n\n\n\n<hr\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\"><strong>ALESSANDRA NYSETHER-SANTOS<\/strong>\u00a0is a Jersey Italian and Florida Brazilian writer, artist, and educator. Their poems can be found in places like\u00a0<em>At\u00e9 Mais: An Anthology of Latinx Futurisms<\/em>, the\u00a0<em>Space538 Poetry Hotline<\/em>, and the\u00a0<em>North Carolina Literary Review<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alessandra Nysether-Santos If I was a drag queen, I would be\u00a0Hugs Hunny\u2014maybe what I mean is\u2026 one of my many selves\u00a0is\u00a0Hugs Hunny. She\u2019s the one who, at a high school party, was hand-feeding baby carrots to drunk teenagers,\u00a0then found a &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=8986\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":8984,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-8986","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P15duy-2kW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8986"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8986\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8994,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8986\/revisions\/8994"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}