Two books by Lillo Way

LEND ME YOUR WINGS, Lillo Way, Shanti Arts Publishing, 2021.

FLYING, TRAPEZE POEMS, Lillo Way, Redbird Chapbooks, 2024.

Before Lisa Ashley invited me to read with her and Lillo Way, last fall at Eagle Harbor Books, I had heard of Lillo, but had not had the privilege of meeting her or reading her work.

Lillo is named after her grandmother, stage-name Lillo Dillon (1875-1939), a trapeze artist—in a family billed as the “The Flying Dillons, Demons of the Air”—with Barnum & Bailey. The 22 poems of Flying illustrate—illuminate—the original Lillo’s life: “trained to fly,” and first put on a tight rope at age four. It’s a story that of course a granddaughter would catch onto (and no matter how her mother tried to ground her). Of course Lillo Way’s personal history is filled with acting, dancing, and choreography. And award-winning poems.

In Lend Me Your Wings the grandmother’s story also appears, but in every poem in the collection (over 100 pages), flight is interwoven with fancy. I love the sound work in these poems, and the specificity. A half-moon is framed by a window, “mullioned and muntined.” Even a poem about snoring is staged: “A bulldozer of sound. A demolition derby.” Nothing, in Lillo Way’s hands, feels ordinary. Rain in Porticello is “knives and forks frogs and ropes / halyards halberds cords and threads,” “all spangle-bangled” and falling. Clothes are tasseled and sequined, and so is memory. A performance.

Here’s one short poem to show you what I mean:

Starlets

Eighteen starlings strung along a power cable.
Sunlings, really—day birds—shining blacker
than night in the light of the longest day,
all watching the same direction, as if danger
couldn’t possibly approach from tailward.
A chorus line in a shallow proscenium theater,
each chorine staring straight downstage,
world’s shortest-legged Rockettes,
shuffling a little up or down the line.
You figure it’s the best they an do,
forgetting that their dance is all pent-up,
waiting, in the wings.

They leave the high-wire dance floor in a fugue.
A crowd of crows bursts into raucous cheers.

—Lillo Way

Having read Flying, this poem makes me think of “The Glamorous Life,” where the original Lillo shares housing with other single female performers, their half-dozen languages, their raucous laughter. Ellen Bass calls Lend Me Your Wings, “a celebration and joy,” an apt description for all of Lillo’s poems, packed tight with what lifts us: trapeze arts, beauty, dance, fire, wings, song. I invite you to take a deeper dive by visiting Lillo’s website, https://www.lilloway.com.