Meagan: Hi, this is the Poetry Podcast and would you please state your name and pronouns.

Masha: Hi, my name is Masha Ames, I’m a senior and I go by she/her.

Meagan: Awesome. Please recite your poem for us.

Masha: Yes, the title is “Life”

It’s raining men while the women

are barking at the full moon.

The wild dogs from the village look like wet rats,

The trees in the forest smell like crisp wintergreen,

I hear the wolves howling powerfully in the snowy forest,

I can taste the snowflakes falling one-by-one onto my tongue,

The silver moon tastes like cheese.

Carol works in New York,

there are no wild dogs from the village.

Sophisticated people are sitting by the beach,

there’s pellegrino.

If you eat a burrito, time will stop. What’s cracking, not much.

She swam away. He was as blue as the moon.

They talked crisply and saw his heart beating,

I play piano.

Ultimately, people will meet aliens. They will ignite my bitter fireplace.

I’ll have to see the sun to know that it’s over, это да. 

The stars danced the night away.

Women are the moon, the stars, and the rising sun. 

Meagan: Nice. What inspired you to write that poem?

Masha: I was kind of in a weird moment where I was into this dark scene, I guess. Where I imagined a dark village with like fur trees and a full moon and a night scene.

Meagan: Awesome, what is the language in the second to last verse?

Masha: It’s Russian and it means: that’s it.

Meagan: Did you follow a specific type of poetry or did you know what you wanted to do when you started or did it just flow?

Masha: I didn’t have a set way of writing it, I guess, but just kind of whatever came to my mind in the moment and I wrote it.

Meagan: What would you say to other poets when they read this poem?

Masha: I guess it has imagery like whenever I read it, I think of a specific scene, so I think just trying to imagine what the scene is while the poem is being read.

Meagan: Thank you so much.