Artist Profile: Brande Damiana

Person with long slightly wavy blond hair holding out a fistful of mardi gras beads

Pronouns: She/Her

Brande is a graysexual poet writing and hiding poetry in the Snoqualmie Valley.

Instagram: @bwdpoetry

“Words for Longing”

Lipstick prints on a piece of paper in a glass bottle

2021

Mixed media

As a lifelong beachcomber, I’ve always wanted to find a message in a bottle, but haven’t been so lucky yet. I decided that I would write out some of my poetry, seal it into bottles, and cast them to the waves.

Any time I would take a bottle to a beach I would joke with myself that I was “dropping off a resume” and imagine that,  somewhere on the shores of spacetime, there exists a seaside village looking to hire a poet and that this was the usual way poets applied for beach haunting positions.


“The Moon, the Sea, and the Blood”

piece of paper with writing on it, tied with a ribbon inside glass bottle

2020

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Only my closest friends knew about my secret abandoned poetry project. And then Covid-19 shut the world down. One of my confidants (and supplier of gorgeous scotch bottles) suggested that what with people needing a bit more magic these days, maybe I would consider leaving poetry bottles where people might have a better chance of finding them.

It took some convincing, but I gradually started leaving bottles on lonely trails, then on not so lonely trails, then hiding right out in the open. I’ve grown so bold that I now enlist friends and acquaintances into becoming poetry smuggling accomplices and delivering my messages to likely locations on their travels.


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