When the Body Knows Before the Words Do with Dustin Miller
What happens when the body knows something before language can name it? For this Dallas-based queer poet, writing begins in that unsettled space between experience and expression—where desire, intimacy, identity, freedom, and the private self resist easy definitions. Her work is deeply attentive to the stories we construct around ourselves and others, while remaining beautifully suspicious of the structures that try to make human experience neat and legible.
From examining desire as both intimate and political to questioning our assumptions about strangers, place, marriage, care, and belonging, her poetry invites readers to linger in complexity rather than rush toward a verdict. In this conversation with Wingless Dreamer, she reflects on the evolving themes behind her work, the contradictions of being queer in Texas, the limitations and possibilities of language, and why sometimes the most truthful poem is the one that leaves something unnamed.
Your poetry often explores queer embodiment, desire, intimacy, and the complexities of the private self. What first drew you to these themes, and how have they evolved throughout your writing journey?
Answer: I don’t think I initially understood them as themes. They were simply the places where my experience kept exceeding the language I had for it.
For a long time, I was very good at building a life that was legible—to other people and, eventually, to myself. One of my poems calls excellence “camouflage,” and that idea has become increasingly important to me: the ways we can become so successful at inhabiting an acceptable version of ourselves that we stop noticing what it leaves out.
Queerness, desire, intimacy, marriage, freedom—those became interesting to me not because I wanted to make declarations about them, but because they kept revealing gaps between what a life looked like and what the body knew.
The work has evolved from asking, “What happened to me?” toward questions I find more interesting: Who gets to name an experience? What happens when care becomes structure, or structure becomes ownership? What does the body know before language catches up? Increasingly, I’m less interested in confession than in the systems we build around intimacy—and what happens when something living exceeds them.
In your work, desire feels larger than romance—it becomes a way of understanding identity, language, and power. What fascinates you most about writing desire as a literary subject rather than simply an emotional experience?
Answer: I’m fascinated by desire because it is information without necessarily being instruction.
We tend to make desire answer questions it never agreed to answer. If I want this, what does that mean about whom I love? If my body responds, what does that prove? If something changes inside me, who caused it? Desire becomes evidence in a trial it didn’t know was happening.
What interests me is the moment before all of that interpretation—the body leaning before the mind has decided what the movement means. Desire can be sexual, certainly, but it can also be a desire for language, freedom, beauty, another city, another version of the self, or simply a life that feels more alive. In some of my work, another person becomes less the origin of desire than the circumstance in which something already present becomes visible.
That makes desire both intimate and political for me. The question stops being merely “What do I want?” and becomes “Who gets to decide what my wanting means, what it obligates me to do, and whether it belongs to anyone besides me?”
Your recent poem Public Trust examines the assumptions we make about strangers and the narratives we build around them. As a poet, how do you balance observation with interpretation when transforming everyday moments into art?
Answer: I’m interested in the instant when observation becomes story, because it happens much faster than we like to admit.
In Public Trust, I see a woman walking through a park wearing a shirt that says “TRUST GOD / NOT GOVERNMENT,” and almost immediately I have given her a voice, a politics, an entire argument. The poem initially follows that interpretation—the public path, sprinklers, city workers, benches—and then has to turn the scrutiny back on the speaker. The crucial realization for me is that the emphasis was mine.
The shirt did not tell me where to place the weight.
That is probably the balance I’m after: observation gives the poem something solid enough to resist me. Interpretation is inevitable; I don’t pretend the observer can disappear. But the poem has to remain suspicious of the authority of its own interpretation.
I love ordinary details partly because they push back. A shirt is still a shirt. A path holds someone’s weight whether or not it supports my argument. The object doesn’t have to surrender all of its meaning simply because I noticed it.
Many of your poems explore the tension between what is spoken and what remains unsaid. Do you find yourself more interested in language as a tool for revelation or concealment? Why?
Answer: I love language, but I don’t entirely trust what happens when we ask it to make experience too clean. Naming can be liberating—it can let something previously invisible become real. But naming can also become a demand: say what this was, define what you felt, tell me what it means, give me an answer I can hold.
That pressure appears repeatedly in my work. In first reader, the poem exists before its explanation; each explanation “dresses” it until the thing being understood is no longer quite the thing that first knew what it knew. In connection, even moving between English and Spanish doesn’t solve the problem.
I’m interested in language as revelation, but also in preserving whatever revelation cannot completely contain. Sometimes the most truthful sentence is the one that admits there is still something outside it.
As a Dallas-based queer poet, how has place shaped your writing? Are there aspects of Texas, its culture, or its contradictions that continue to find their way into your work?
Answer: Place enters my writing through accumulation more than declaration.
Dallas is running routes, heat held in pavement, fountains shutting down before a freeze, bamboo appearing where there was bare ground, trash at the curb, the train tracks east of Deep Ellum at sunset, Exall Park becoming so familiar that eventually my feet choose the route without asking me.
I’m interested in the way repetition turns geography into bodily knowledge. You stop merely moving through a city and begin carrying it.
Texas also contains contradictions that feel very useful to me as a writer. I think being queer here has also made me attentive to the difference between belonging and legibility.
A place can be home without agreeing with you completely. You can love where you are and still imagine leaving it.
Increasingly, my poems allow those sentences to coexist rather than making one defeat the other.
Your poetry frequently examines the systems, expectations, and invisible pressures that shape intimate lives. What do you hope readers discover about themselves after spending time with your work?
Answer: I hope they become a little less eager to force themselves into a verdict.
A lot of my work begins with systems that seem useful: marriage, rules, categories, evidence, language, even ideas like honesty and care. I’m not interested in saying those structures are inherently oppressive. Structures can protect us, organize experience, and make intimacy possible. The question is what happens when the structure begins claiming authority over the life inside it.
Loving something does not mean you must remain inside it. Leaving does not require you to declare everything before it false. Desire does not retroactively erase devotion. A body can know something without turning that knowledge into a command.
If readers leave the work trusting complexity a little more—and requiring themselves to become legible a little less—that would mean a great deal to me.
RAPID FIRE ROUND
You've written about desire, language, intimacy, and the private self. Now it's time for the truly difficult questions—the ones no MFA program prepares you for. Choose wisely. Your poetic reputation may or may not survive this round.
1. A perfect poem arrives at 3 AM. You:
A. Write it down immediately ✅
B. Convince yourself you'll remember it and forget everything by breakfast
C. Wake up, write one brilliant line, then accidentally order socks online
2. Your biggest writing red flag:
A. Editing the title for three hours
B. Starting a new poem before finishing the old one
C. Calling procrastination "creative incubation"
3. A reader says, "I don't understand your poem."
A. "Neither do I anymore." ✅
B. "That's part of the experience."
C. "Excellent. It's working."
4. Which villain is most likely to be secretly writing poetry?
A. Dracula
B. The IRS auditor
C. The person who leaves "seen" but never replies ✅
5. Your ideal writing outfit:
A. A carefully curated aesthetic look
B. Whatever was closest to the floor
C. Pajamas that have become a lifestyle ✅
6. If desire were banned from poetry tomorrow, you'd write about:
A. Tax forms with unbearable passion
B. The emotional complexity of avocados
C. Why one specific text message ruined your week ✅
7. You open an old notebook and find a poem from five years ago. Your first reaction:
A. "Wow, I was talented."
B. "Wow, I was dramatic." ✅
C. "Who wrote this and why are they living in my notebook?"
8. Which poetic emergency is worst?
A. Losing your notebook
B. Losing your Wi-Fi during a submission deadline
C. Realizing your "new poem" is one you already wrote ✅
9. Your husband catches you staring into space for 20 minutes. You're:
A. Writing a poem in your head
B. Solving a philosophical crisis ✅
C. Thinking about a conversation from 2017 you should have won
10. The true superpower of a poet is:
A. Turning heartbreak into art ✅
B. Finding metaphors in absolutely everything
C. Spending six months on a poem and calling it "a quick draft"
Bonus Question: A poem, a deadline, and a nap walk into a room. Which one wins?
A. The poem ✅
B. The deadline
C. The nap (and honestly, it wasn't even close) 😄
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dustin Miller is a poet and cross-genre writer based in Dallas. His work explores what happens when lived experience exceeds the systems designed to contain it, moving through questions of embodiment, desire, memory, evidence, ownership, and freedom. He writes across lyric and bilingual poetry, hybrid nonfiction, fiction, screenwriting, and playable forms, often using objects, rules, interfaces, and systems to test what language can and cannot hold. His work appears or is forthcoming in Cathexis Northwest Press, Eunoia Review, Book of Matches, Ballast Journal, Bloodroot Poetry Journal, Beyond Words Magazine, The New Verse News, and Wingless Dreamer, among other venues.
Comments