By John Brantingham
FROM: The Journal of Radical Wonder

John: Your work, especially in this poem captures the beauty of the much maligned Inland Empire. Is this a passion of yours, to show the area as it is rather than it is portrayed to be, and why do you focus on that?

Gina Duran: In “Fontana is Where the Winds Destroyed Everything,” I wanted to describe my childhood environment, by using the landscape as both the reality of the world I grew up in and as a metaphor of my creation and birth. Though wind is beautiful, it can also be treacherous and highly destructive. I wanted people to be able to connect to the character despite gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or spiritual belief. So even though I do mention gender, I discuss it in third person and I mention several people, outside of the girl being abused. I explain that teenage girls drop out of school and teenage boys become gangbangers. I want people to see that violence creates more violence. I grew up being frisked, because of shootings on campus. I saw young boys shooting each other. I saw young girls get addicted to drugs, because of drugs my uncles sold to them.

I saw trauma inside and outside of my home and was told that wasn’t trauma. I was told that I should be grateful to God for my childhood, because I had hot pink carpet in a room overlooking the kumquat trees, in a two story home. But things don’t create a home, love and nurturing do. When I told my mother I was raped she told me that never happened. She told me that she asked me and that I said I fought him off of me. (That conversation never happened, but I was most definitely raped.)

“The Santa Ana Winds bang against bodies/like a 10 year old girl being beaten by a door torn/off the hinges,” because that’s what my mother did to me. The wind helps me describe the violence done by others to me, not just express emotion, or let others see themselves in my experiences. The wind can be both predictable and unpredictable, and has many personalities. Sometimes the wind is enjoyable and breezy, and sometimes it isn’t even noticed and completely ignored for the messages it brings or the stories it tells. It’s so multifaceted. That’s why I chose to create and birth my character as wind in this poem. It shows the hardship that the wind endured by other winds before it. It shows when the wind tried to leave the earth, and when it chose to live. Breath is moving air and therefore wind. I find peace, strength, and gratitude in knowing that we experience death and rebirth between every inhalation and exhalation, so I guess that’s where you would find the contrast. Read Poem Here