Keeping the beast from beasting: a conversation with Emily Pérez and Sasha West

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share and examine their work, produced and moderated by John Gillespie. Episode 6 features Emily Pérez and Sasha West. Emily Pérez reads “How I Learned to Be a Girl” from her book What Flies Want, and Sasha West reads “Habitable,” from her book How to Abandon Ship. HOW I LEARNED TO BE A GIRL By Emily Pérez If the beast is unpredictable you must traverse in postures of submission. Easier to crawl with your face down toward the earth, nape exposed, expecting to be struck, which may draw cold contempt, at best compassion. Fragility may inspire a desire to protect. I learned young to dance those careful steps around the unexploded mines where ground was not yet gutted.   Holy, she was, the woman who stood beside the beast, and I aimed to be just like her, turning my arrow toward my chest. I learned the songs that lulled, the charms that ironed flat the prickling ruff along his neck, the hair that spiked along his spine when agitated, and when from his sleep guttered a fitful growl or grinding teeth, I placed, just like a night-guard, my careful wrist inside his mouth.   HABITABLE   By Sasha West How in courting, we compared childhoods: running a finger over the nubby globe, half red with codes: deforested, desertified, deserted.   My family wasted water: orange marigolds in a single line. His washed clothes & sidewalks. In school we learned water as a system of arteries. In the mysteries I read: bodies bled out. The teacher asked us to imagine we were the woman in a Yemen without water: opening her door to the neighbor’s news, gathering clothes and goods. Goodbye house. Goodbye hill.   Being inside the sharpest pain: trying it on again and again: my body expanded into the world through her door. What was wrong leaked into me. Every year, more tumbleweeds ready to burst against our car with a loud crack. And his school assembly with slides.   The Before shots: a green lush happiness, pulsing—. Only our parents could really imagine us in a different childhood. Can I say we didn’t know? Or did—and didn’t care when we had her? What the body wants is deeper than the mind. The world expanded into my body. My body wanted more room to fit the pain in. A globe. A belly. If I look backwards, I can still !nd no map for this— world as it spins out. Human need to tamp the worry down into the body. Now when I imagine the sharpest pain: you are older. You open your door. Emily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize and a finalist for a Colorado Book Award. She co-edited The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, also a finalist for a Colorado Book Award. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Critic, she has received grants and scholarships from Hedgebrook, the Community of Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, and Summer Literary Seminars. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her poems and criticism have appeared in journals including Copper Nickel, Fairy Tale Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Diode, RHINO, The Guardian, LARB, The Georgia Review, and DIAGRAM. She is a high school teacher in Denver where she lives with her family. Learn more at emilyperez.org. Sasha West is the author of How to Abandon Ship and Failure and I Bury the Body, winner of the National Poetry Series, a Texas Institute of Letters award, and a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship. Recent poems and interviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Tupelo Quarterly, Kenyon Review Online, Georgia Review, and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. As part of eco-arts collaborative Hammonds + West, her multi-media shows with visual artist Hollis Hammonds have been exhibited at the Columbus College of Art and Design, Texas A&M, ArtPrize Michigan, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University, where she runs the Environmental Humanities program. Learn more at sashawest.net. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website or Simplecast podcast feed for more episodes. Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more and get in touch: poetrymedicineforthesoul.com