Poet Nadine Maestas on psychedelic journeying and seeing the sacred in everything

April 28, 2023 / 7:03 am

Each day during the month of April, KUOW is highlighting the work of Seattle-based poets for National Poetry Month. In this series curated by Seattle Civic Poet and Ten Thousand Things host Shin Yu Pai, you'll find a selection of poems for the mind, heart, senses, and soul.

In "I Dreamt that We Ate Mushrooms Together," poet Nadine Antoinette Maestas brings the reader along on a sacred and immersive journey of becoming one again with nature, to remind humans of our own fundamental wildness.

Maestas is a poet's poet and believes that the empire of the sentence is an extremely oppressive totalitarian regime. She holds an M.F.A. from University of Michigan’s Hellen Zell Writer’s Program and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. She is the co-author with Karen Weiser of “Beneath the Bright Discus” (Potes & Poets Press, 2000), and is a co-editor for the poetry anthology "Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia." Her first solo book, "Imperialism As Sweet As Insult", was published by Really Serious Literature Press in 2021. She teaches at Cornish College of the Arts.

I Dreamt that We Ate Mushrooms Together

slowly crunching them in our back molars
we decided to wander into the forest
the mildly hypothermic rain
crisp air
redwood floor
convinced us to strip down to know nothing
in front of the forest
in that way only
would we feel its power
I dreamt that we ate mushrooms together
as we decided to strip like cedar trees
and run naked into the forest
feet dull aching
to the edge of the peninsula
where we decided
to jump into the temperamental ocean
lipping the tip of the craggy shore
we imagined premodern
whalers much stronger than us
laughing among the sea stacks
roaring and kaw-kaw-kaw-ing at us
as we are taken by the ancient tides
like Beowulf to a new imagination
under the sea stacks
roaring in front of the forest
I dreamt we ate mushrooms together and found
the trees were hewing and mewing at us all along the shore
and we just never noticed how loud
they all are at once and in this moment of being
deafened by the trees
we saw God in everything just like Nietzsche said we would
under the rocks and stars and planets revolving
in the soil and mulch
under our bare feet and in a delirium
under dehydration and under the ocean we saw it all
up through the roots and branches and leaves
and even in the moon so far away
the moon that shone on the pacific shores
moving the deadly tides
we never noticed
how loud they were
all at once they roared and we ran back into ourselves
and we became wolves who ran all day and all night
out of exuberance
I dreamt we ate the mushrooms

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Shin Yu Pai
Host, Ten Thousand Things

Shin Yu Pai is the current Civic Poet for The City of Seattle (2023-24) and host of KUOW's podcast Ten Thousand Things (formerly The Blue Suit). She is an award-winning writer and visual artist based in Seattle.
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