THE POEM OF US
a collaborative poem written on May 9th, 2025
Endnotes
I visited the Hostile Terrain 94 exhibit at the Museum of Us in San Diego’s Balboa Park recently. If you’re in or around San Diego in the next few months, I recommend the visit. The exhibit is interactive, tactile, and illuminating; it’s also harrowing, disheartening, and revealing. Some of the central questions the exhibit curators pose to the museum visitors are:
What connections can we see throughout history?
How does a legacy of exclusion continue to this day?
What really makes this terrain so hostile?
These are helpful questions for considering the reality of death and displacement that the exhibit is working to expose, but I think these questions are also noteworthy when applied to a curated institutional space catered to tourists and patrons.
What connections can we not see in a museum space?
How does a legacy of exclusion continue in the context of mass death, extreme violence, and suppressed resistance?
What really makes this city, country, and globally connected civilization so hostile?
I was thinking through these questions as I walked around the museum, and I took some notes that turned into a poem. But, since the exhibit was housed in the context of The Museum of "Us" and because the topic of human rights implicates us all, I thought the situation necessitated some collaboration.
After I finish writing a reflective poem, I asked my family and girlfriend to edit, add to, or change the writing in whatever way they wanted. The only constraint I gave them in this collaboration was to not ask permission or reveal what they changed. We passed around my laptop, each taking a turn to write while hanging at a coffee shop. Even though I was the only one of my collaborators who went to the Museum of Us, I asked my collaborators to write without the same context by inserting their own voice to what they were given.
“The Poem of Us” is an attempt at a disappropriated poem (see The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza if you are interesting in reading more) that is collaborative and aware of itself. I hope you consider trying out a collaborative writing exercise, too.
WRITING PROMPT: Write a short reflection to something around you: what you can see, a song, a show you watched last night, a place, an artwork, etc. Then, give (or trade) what you wrote to someone else. Ask them to edit, change, and add to the writing without asking permission—they should have complete creative control to shape the writing as they see fit. From there, repeat the process with others or do multiple more rounds between you and your partner.