Creation Myth

Lisa Wells explores her own mysterious illness and the environmental crisis facing the planet.

“And as for the getting over

there will be no ascension,
no circumambulation,
there is only going through.

We must go through it.”

“The old world is ending. And we don’t know what’s coming down the pike. I think what people are realizing more and more is the only way that any of us survive this is through cooperation…. ‘We must go through it’ is also an invitation. To go through together. We can’t avoid the reckoning but we don’t have to do it alone.”

Bughouse Square With Eve Ewing: episode 5

Host Eve Ewing explains how much Sandra Cisneros’ writing means to her and how the stories resonate with her childhood in Chicago. Archival guest Cisneros talks to Studs about the tradition of Chicano writers, the wisdom of her mother, and the representation of fierce women in her work. Present-day guest Erika L. Sánchez explains how some readers believe her work is representative of the Latinx experience and how she wrestled with mental health while writing her YA novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. Click here for more on Bughouse Square.

Sanctuary

Donika Kelly recalls a class field trip to a sea lion sanctuary when she was in sixth grade.

“How the girl wishes this measure of salvation for herself:

to claim her own barking voice, to revel
in her own scent and sleek brown body, her fingers
woven into the cyclone fence.”

“The girl at the end who is like me, but with much more sophisticated thinking, imagining salvation. I don’t think when I went to the sea lion rescue I was like, ‘I would like to be saved like the sea lions are saved.’ But there was something really resonant in that image.”

We Are Saying Yes But Who Are We To Say

Khaled Mattawa remembers the sense of hope felt during the Arab Spring and at the prospect of having a second child. Mattawa describes the poem Che Fece ... Il Gran Rifiuto by Constantine Cavafy, “There are people that are prepared to receive the yes of life, and there are people who are not.”

“So I am saying yes but I’m also wondering who am I to say yes, who am I to embrace this life. … I’m always saying, ‘I belong to the yes,’ but the yes is always saying, ‘no. Maybe you’re not good enough.’ So I’m always trying to plead my case to the yes of the universe. And the yes of the universe comes and goes in my life.”

In the Next Next World

Gillian Conoley discusses the devastation wrought by the October 2017 Northern California wildfires. “There’s a sense of the literal event of the fire, but there’s also the sense of what it’s like to live in a geological time that’s called the Anthropocene, where we as human beings have taken precedence over the life of the earth. … After the California wildfires it was as though one was living in the aftermath of the Anthropocene.”

Girl Soup

Sawako Nakayasu imagines eating a bowl of girl soup and the conundrum posed by her own intervention. “The speaker spends most of the poem appearing to be empathetic, or trying to find a solution. And to me it is important to address fact that the speaker can be both the problem and the solution at same time. That’s really I think the soup we live in, is that we’re all part of the solution and the problem at the same time.”

Time Traveler's Haibun 1989

Maureen Thorson recalls details of her life in 1989 when she was 10 years old.

“Loblollies shiver
In May heat. The world’s ending.
The world’s a mirage.”

“That life, that I led at the age of ten, is gone. It’s not there anymore. So that world did end. But to what extent was the world as I perceived it even really there to begin with? I don’t know. In some ways it really was a mirage.”

Ash Weed

Laura Marie Marciano describes the feeling of freedom after leaving an abusive relationship.

“When you’re able to have that sense, finally, that you can embody your own power. You can embody your own voice. There’s this joy. This summer I was sitting on a beach in Italy, and the beach was purple! The rocks were purple. …And I’m here, and the person who’s hurt me is not here.

My killer is not going to be invited to this
Ornamenting party and I am blue daisies”

Chase Scene

“I don’t think that this one immediately signals that it’s a love poem. But I wanted to see: can you write a love poem about this somewhat negative and kind of confusing and strange experience that still primarily focuses on the fact that a home is being built between two people.”- Gabriel Ojeda-Sague

Know No Name

“I’ve always believed that language actually makes things happen. Not what the words mean necessarily, but the sound of them. In this poem I really decided to foreground that. Rather than try to write a poem about something, I would allow sound to draw me. It is not that I don’t think this poem has a subject, it’s more that those meanings are rooted in the sound of the poem itself.” -Kazim Ali on PoetryNow