CURRENT ISSUE

Reality, Specificity, & Prophecy:
Chimedum Ohaegbu interviews Cassandra Myers

This is our second encounter over poetry—Room Magazine, which I edit for, is excited to publish a few poems of yours for our Science issue. When I read “Quantum Entanglement for Honeybees and Other Yellow Collisions,” I was pleased to re-encounter the interest in scientific language that pulled me towards your poems in Room. Could you tell me more about your connection to science, how it made this poem possible, and how/if this relationship has changed from the past to the present?

I believe a good poem always has three things—reality, specificity, and prophecy. When my memory fails me, and the details are slippery, science comes in as a somatic bridge. A sensorium can be called upon from a perfumery encyclopedia when the smell of her hair is a concept rahter than an experience I can call upon and feel on command. Science—with its claims on the universe of truth—supplements a macrocosmic honesty within a poem's microcosmicity. It provides, again and again, even when debunked, a timelessness I do not afford myself in how I record my life. My journals, often anxiety ledgers, miss the best parts of my inch-by-inches, but the 700-page textbook I made for myself on the science of my disability? It brings me comfort that when the worms come, someone might name my fossil.

You’re a multidisciplinary poet, writing work that blossoms best visually, on the page; work that gains its momentum in being heard, as in your closing poem for the 2022 Ada Lovelace Festival; and then video-poems that benefit from being heard and seen, as in “Everyone Wants A Tight Pussy So Here Take Mine.” What about “Quantum Entanglement for Honeybees and Other Yellow Collisions” made it work best as a page poem? If you were to perform it as a stage poem, or a video-poem, what imagery or tempo do you see yourself applying to it?

"Quantum Entanglement for Honeybees and Other Yellow Collisions" was always a performance poem. It was the poem I used to propose to the love of my life at an all-femme poetry slam in a Mennonite chapel in Boston. I had written it the day before, it was three minutes longer than the time limit, we didn’t care for a score, it was the one moment of my life that truly felt like a celebration. More than the rush of our DIY wedding days, more than the missed collisions that led to our too-early divorce. I lost my best friend in the whole world to my inability to find her in it, a million moments over (as she cited), and this poem is one of the few relics I have left of who I was to her. You can find the original reading and proposal here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjtKpc1OqYk. We don’t speak anymore.

Your bio mentions that you work at the intersection of, among other things, “world-building,” and as a writer of fantasy, I’m interested in when the genre’s tenets are folded into other literary forms. Could you tell me a bit about the world-building that went into “Quantum Entanglement for Honeybees and Other Yellow Collisions”?

Think—running back through airport security for one last kiss. Think—California coastlines and lagoons that run through her suburb, driving to the beach at noon, picking them up from their job as a middle school science gardener in San Francisco. Scream-singing “Everywhere to Me” on the highway with the headlights too dim, looping the off-ramps because as long as I’m with you we’re going the right direction. Think—the softest lips you’ve ever known, freckles, her hair still long. Think—the first girl you’ve ever loved and the last girl you ever will. Think reading poems to each other, head in my lap. Falling asleep on facetime. Three-hour time difference. Screenshotting her old photos from Facebook to feel like you knew her then. Making out on the cross-state bus. The most present, and alive, and aligned you’ve ever been, that it feels like being inside the movie, not watching it. Think, every movie you watched at 14 but you’re the main character. Think of the most in love you’ve ever been, and frame it in gold.

Section vii. of “Quantum Entanglement for Honeybees and Other Yellow Collisions” echoed through me; I was so struck how the poem’s “bonded pair” has been taught care in the past and how it’s translated into their relationship now, how the speaker “fold[s] dumplings the way she taught you / because that’s how you taught [the speaker.]” Are there poets, other artists, beloveds, or nonhuman relations who your writing hearkens back to—a fondness for alliteration learned from a given author, an attention to colour learned from a bird (or a honeybee)?

Currently, I am in residency on Gabriola Island alone where my one companion is a crow I’m trying to feed until it remembers my face and brings me trinkets. I haven’t started writing yet, but anyone who knows me knows that I’m the oyster girl. Bivalves and other sessile creatures have a chokehold on my crippled heart. I’ve been printing my poems onto shells ever since. I hope to write a book about my divorce, called “A Death In The Family” entirely of obituaries for my favourite moments with all the people I’ve loved most in this world who I don’t speak to anymore, but still have dreams about every night. I recently had a poem published on the TTC in Toronto called “Without You Is a City I Don’t Want to Live In.” I hope to start making more public poetic art installations as a public mourning ritual—printing my poems onto hundreds and hundreds of wonton spoons—the item her father used to propose to her mother with, and that she proposed to me with.

The romance at the centre of this poem is many things; among them, antithetical to the necropolitical aims of many heteropatriarchal, ableist systems: “In this formula, / unlike others about bodies sick and brown as ours, / no one has to die for it to become discourse.” As a crisis intervention counsellor, how does healing, and the prioritization of yourself and people like you as sacred, figure into your poetic practice, and vice versa?

My forthcoming book of poems—Smash The Headlights—is a book entirely about men and the violence of men I’d rather forget. The time I spent writing about them for the sake of ? what ? healing ? forcing that experience to have been for something? To every poem I wrote, edited, and now will publish about a horrible man, I lost writing a moment I had with her. I thought I would have her forever, that the book about her would be next, “MITSKI’S GOMBOC FOR XXXXXX” still sits open on my desktop. I will never make that mistake again. Now when I write, I want it to be about the things I want to remember. Having CPTSD means that your memory is trained to prioritize recalling your wounds. Through somatics, I’m retraining my system to have a larger somatic lexicon, or as my somatics teacher Yuji Oka would call it, a greater availability. To be porous again to the things I want to welcome in, and be discerning about that which has no business coming my way.

Do you remember what the first line of the poem you wrote was? Could you tell me the circumstances of its writing—if it woke you from sleep to move toward a pen, or came down to you during a louder moment? How did it change over the lifespan of this poem’s creation, and what craft elements were you thinking about when editing the line or building around it?

The first line of the poem is the first line as it exists now. I didn’t change much from the original draft. Like all my favourite ideas, the work comes to me in a rush and then is whittled down over time till it’s published in a magazine. This poem is almost a decade old now, originally written in 2018. When I edited it for the page, I’m always thinking of how to use the page as a choreographic intention, how to show my movements as if I was physically performing it, which is why my work tends to be highly visual. Before I was a poet, I was a visual artist. I still have plans to go to art school in Spain someday. I’m always thinking about Ocean Vuong’s essay on the “autobiography of sight” when crafting a metaphor. I have vision impairments that mean my eyes are unable to physically see the present because the image processing centres in my brain steal my “sight” to constantly visualize the past or future in supercuts. Girls with lazy eyes are just one of the three fates. A poem without a clear visual concept is a missed opportunity.

What are you reading right now, and why? What were you reading during the writing of this, and why?

During the writing of this I was only reading my ex-wife’s poems and the letters she sent to me. Vague memories of Homie by Danez Smith. Right now I have a stack of: Garbage Poems, The Theory of Water, The World After Rain, and All the Flowers Kneeling on my bedside table.

Do you have any fun facts about honeybees that you learned during the writing of this poem?

A Greek beekeeper named Isidoros Ţiminis has consistently documented a phenomenon where bees build honeycomb hives around religious icons of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and saints without covering their faces or bodies. This behavior, practiced for over a decade, involves the bees "waxing" the icons but leaving the holy figures intact.

Flowers typically hold a negative electric charge, which interacts with a positively charged flying bee. Upon landing, the bee transfers positive charge to the flower, causing a temporary surge in the electrical potential (up to 25 millivolts in petunias) that alters the field for 1–2 minutes, signaling to other bees that the flower is "closed" or depleted of nectar.

In apitherapy, the hum of a hive (often cited in the range of 190–400 Hz) can help entrain the human nervous system, promoting a shift toward a parasympathetic state.

 

 

---

---

We gratefully acknowledge all of our supporters