Priscilla Wathington and Sam Sax: April 11, 2024

Sam Sax begins by reading from their latest book, Pig, which Sax introduces as a work that uses pigs as a lens to think through masculinity, policing, and the ecological, among other themes. The poems read include: "For my Niblings, in Anticipation of their Birth," "Xenotransplantations,""Babe the Pig Does the Sheep Noise When Mourning Its Mother," "Poem for Miss Piggy" and "Hog Lagoon." Sax finishes with new work, including "Ode to Those Who Block Tunnels and Bridges," written on the day of the Bay 78's arraignment, and in celebration of those putting their bodies on the line to halt the flow of weapons being provided toward the destruction of Gaza and its people.

Priscilla Wathington, after thanking Sam Sax, her hosts, and Susan Gevirtz (in the audience), reads a selection of poems from her chapbook Paper and Stick, as well as new work. She begins with "Area C," titled after a demarcated section of the Palestinian West Bank, and "Hand That Wrings," which uses language from legal documents encountered in Wathington's work with human rights organization Defense for Children International—Palestine.

She follows these with "Three Birthdays," "Dance White Boy in the Sinai," and "You Enter the House And", which Wathington describes as having two voices—one a former Israeli soldier reckoning with his complicity and one a young Palestininan person recently arrested. After this she reads "If I Must Die" by Refaat Alareer, who was murdered in Gaza in a targeted strike by the Israeli military.

Wathington closes with new work, including "This Poem Is Not About Genocide," "Grant Proposal for An Emergency," and "This Document Has No Legal Status and Is Not Bound By Its Contract."

Priscilla Wathington and Sam Sax take questions from the audience and from each other, discussing a wide range of topics including the ways language creates reality, the relationship between Wathington's poems and her work to provide legal aid for Palestinian children subjected to violence under occupation, the work of the legal research group Forensic Architecture, the erotic as a site of transgression, and Jewish antizionism, among other things.