Congrats to current and former contributor Troy Osaki on being a 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow! Read Troy’s new featured poem, “Martial Law Memorial.”
My lyric essay “Licked By Our World We Get Licked By Our World,” which you were kind enough to publish (Thanks again!), is the final essay in a series inspired by the four classical elements of Western antiquity: earth, wind, fire, and water. This is the water one. Previous essays revolve around occasions where I’ve eaten dirt, had a radon reduction tube installed in my house and set myself on fire. For this essay, I started my draft with times when I almost drowned.
I wanted to write a short story that followed Aristotle’s idea of the perfect tragic play: one place, one time, one action. There was a period of about a decade when I traveled frequently between Montreal and Kolkata, and often had long ‘addas’ — conversations — with family members, conversations that involved unresolved conflicts in sitting rooms.
This poem came to be during a workshop in the fall of 2020 with C.S. Giscombe. It was in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic, and the worst fire season I’d experienced living in northern California. Looking back, there was a desire to find fullness and sensuality in the mundane—and precarious—every day of living a life as it is.
