Hi, friends, Podrig here. I hope you've been enjoying season 9 of Portia Unbound.

We're going to take a break for the rest of the year.

So our next episode after today's will be on Monday, January the 13th.

Something slightly different for the rest of the season is that we're only going to be releasing episodes on Monday.

So we're with you until early March every Monday.

On to today's episode.

My name is Podrigo Tuma, and I spend a fair amount of my time doing workshops with groups of people where we look at a poem or we write poems together.

And sometimes it happens where we look at a poem and somebody seamlessly, without any sense of self-consciousness,

moves from speaking about the poem

to speaking about their own life.

The poem changes or invites or opens something up,

unfolds some dynamic of themselves,

and suddenly they have changed that poem too,

because the poem has been desiring somebody to read it like that,

not the original author,

but this stranger who's come to it

and is reading themselves in companionship with the poem.

Inheritance by Diego Baez.

When my child came into this world, she didn't rock mine or turn it upside down, but flipped it inside out.

It felt not like a burning fire, but like a new chamber opening in my heart, a fourth dimension unbending

between sternum and spine. Surely it had lived there all along, huddled with the Spanish I hadn't

spoken in ages. Before I was born, my father bought a 57 Chevy, bright green, gas cap inside one silver-tail fin, ran like shit, poured smoke, no seatbelts.

...