Many people say their experience of time changes after they have children, a phenomenon that Diego Báez captures in “Inheritance.” In this poem, a past, present, and future starring the same child shift ceaselessly in a parent’s mind, like photos flipped through in an album, dots placed on a timeline, moments that one wishes they could build monuments for.

Diego Báez, is a writer and educator in Chicago, where he teaches at the City Colleges of Chicago. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University - Newark. A writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Báez’s work has been published in Freeman's, The Rumpus, The Georgia Review, The Thing Itself Journal, Number Eleven Magazine, and Hobart. His poetry has appeared in Luna Luna, la fovea, Granta, and elsewhere. He serves as a Director of the Board for the National Book Critics Circle and the International David Foster Wallace Society. Báez was an inaugural fellow at CantoMundo in 2010. Yaguareté White, published in 2024 by The University of Arizona Press, is his debut poetry collection.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Diego Báez’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

Wonder and strangeness commingle with the commonplace and universal in Danielle Chapman’s “Trespassing with Tweens.” In a not-quite mirroring, a human mother and her children stand and watch together in awe as a great blue heron flaps in and feeds its two offspring. The pleasures found here are profound and multiple – the joys in seeing, in sharing an experience of seeing, in seeing with fresh eyes, and in being seen.

Danielle Chapman is a poet, essayist, and lecturer in English at Yale University. Her most recent collection of poetry, Boxed Juice, was published in 2024 by Unbounded Edition Press. Her previous collection of poems, Delinquent Palaces, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2015, and her memoir, Holler: A Poet Among Patriots, was released by Unbound Edition Press in 2023. For several years, Chapman served as the Director of Literary Arts and Events for the City of Chicago, and she was also an editor at Poetry Magazine. She currently teaches Shakespeare and creative writing and lives in Hamden, Connecticut, with her family.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Danielle Chapman’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

In Richard Langston’s poem “Hill walk,” he proffers a handful of things that move us over the course of a day — words said or read, notes played, the sight of halting steps taken by a sibling. We marvel at the sound of an unfamiliar bird call, but there’s a startling mystery to the human heart and what it responds to (or doesn’t) and one that we don’t always mark.

Richard Langston is a veteran broadcast journalist and director. He comes from Dunedin, New Zealand, and was a driving force in the city’s music scene in the 1980s. He now lives in Wellington and is a proud member of the three-person South Wellington Poetry Society. His poetry collection, Five O’Clock Shadows, was published in 2020 by The Cuba Press.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Richard Langston’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.