Romy Rhoads Ewing’s debut chapbook, please stay (2024, Bottlecap Press), is a collection of sixteen poems. Challenged by one of her best friends to write 365 poems in 365 days, please stay is a compendium of the highlights of that project in its very infancy. Despite its creation solely during one spring in 2023, the work is divided into four chapters: spring, summer, autumn, and winter, with four poems to represent each season.

           please stay could not exist without Ewing’s own upbringing in Sacramento: the poems featured were written in heat waves, on manzanita-laden trails, in the dirt-sweet waters of the Lower American, in the best gay bars on K Street, in swallowing fog, in oaks with arms outstretched asking to be climbed, on the Blue Line all the way down to I-80, and in infinite bushes of camellias.

Interwoven with motifs of desperation as flattery, neuroses as adoration, and terror as vigor, please stay is an attestation to the way we survive: hope is built into the work, but it’s hiding. please stay is dried starthistle in August. please stay is a hammer toss at the state fair and a whole pack of candy cigarettes. Ewing draws from her own experiences with gender, with identity, with Northern California, but also with anxiety so palpable and fervent it makes the skin crawl, with the way we attach ourselves like mollusks to sinking ships, and the way there is love in everything. Bone in mouth, please stay is a sprint homebound until you taste blood. 

please stay is available for purchase here through Bottlecap Press.