What Is Underneath by Danielle Speakman

ROOM 6.26, Poems

Danielle Speakman, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Cambridge, MA. She is a graduate of Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Her enduring interest is in Jungian depth psychology, and she seeks to hold a therapeutic space where existential and spiritual questions are welcome. She views writing as a form of activism, love, empathy, and attention—essential to all that she does. She believes each of us has a part to play in the particular cosmos of our time. In these moments of helplessness, uncertainty, and war, poetry has become her way of reaching toward others, almost like passing someone a love note. She has been especially deepened by her doctoral work interviewing street children in Lima, Peru, which has continued to connect her to Latin America. She also practices and teaches yoga, which she believes keeps her honest, rooted in her body, and resistant to the pull of abstractions.

The Price of Belonging by Arsalan Malik

Essays

For me, growing up in a fundamentalist, religious dictatorship like Pakistan, I was taught to live in fear of and hate our Indian neighbors who might attack us at any time. I was taught to believe in the supremacy of one religion above all others. I was taught that this religion needed our state to defend it and we, as Pakistanis, were the ultimate expression of the arc of history that inevitably bent toward humanity, united under one God.

We Say “Never Forget” by Tom Hennes

Essays

I don’t believe others have the right to diminish the traumas we have experienced, or we those of others. At the same time, we have to ask ourselves, it seems to me, whether any of us do humanity a service by rallying around the cry of Never Forget when that cry means we should never forget precisely those things that prevent us from knowing the traumas that others have experienced, perhaps even at our own hands—the ways that our good may have been their bad, or could become so, even without our knowledge or consent.

Photo by Matt Palmer. Tasmania, Australia, 2021.

ELEGY AND OBSERVATION: FOR CHORUS AND ELECTRONICS by Eric Chasalow

Art

Elegy and Observation is an environmental requiem. Drawing on ancient and modern texts, the piece leaps and lurches among perspectives from intimate to global, tender to catastrophic. So too, our perceived relationship to the natural world is constantly shifting, from the poet’s tension between fear and delight, to scientific observation, biblical prediction of catastrophe, the unassailable truth of species extinction, and the poetry of those who have experienced natural disaster.

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GHOSTS OF OUR FORMER SELVES by Eric Chasalow

Art

The songs comprising my October 2020 release, Ghosts of Our Former Selves, including the two presented here, were deliberately composed in a confessional mode. They form a forty-minute sonic memoir that draws on everything I have spent my six-plus decades learning as a composer of contemporary classical music (especially computer music) with deep roots in jazz and popular music traditions.

© Linda Louis

FAMLY OF HUMANS by Linda Louis

Art

Famly of Humans seeks to illustrate how we all are equal, regardless of the color of our skin or the shape of our features. It begs acceptance of the idea that tolerance and respect without judgment can exist. By presenting a disparate population in microcosm where no one is prejudged and there is no exclusivity, Famly of Humans promotes the idea of diversity where we are all on equal footing, no one is marginalized, and social acceptance is the norm.

© Susan Luss

IN THE TIME OF NOW by Susan Luss

Art

For a long time, I have used my body in creation of my work. The landscapes/maps on canvas are distillations of my urban wanderings, both physical and psychological. The emergence of these public performances—I’ll call them “urban en plein air interventions”—have become imperative for my survival “in the time of now.”