Aileen Cassinetto: California Poets Part 9, Three Poems
- Oct 19, 2023
- 12 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Aileen Cassinetto
December 22nd, 2025
California Poets: Part IX
Aileen Cassinetto
Three Poems
This Burning Bush According to Ruth Waters
Call it a relief, this kind of blossoming,
carving pieces of hardwood logs into acts
of crossing. See the difference between
earlywood and latewood, how one is darker
and heavier. If you want the whole story,
look at the rings, you can always tell
when the years were good, and what was
endured when they were not. Do not go
between the vessels. Do not carve
against the grain. Welcome rain
with the generosity of trees.
This is how you cut the heart
without cracking, how you can hold it
palms up against all weathering.
A Theory for Everything
I feel like giving birth to a thousand stars.
But to do this, I would need the energy
of collapsing giants, which is roughly equal
to the energy a whole galaxy gives off
in one year. I’m trying to make sense of it all
because bringing anything of value
into being is an alchemy
of gravity and, dare I say, insanity,
I mean, just look at the big picture.
And then my eight-year-old niece asks
if there is a God, and while it is human
to wonder, I wish she had been unquestioning
a bit longer. Already a big picture
thinker, she plays Civilization VI
like a boss, settles cities, builds science hubs,
decides which of her cities get her governors,
in other words, owns it like a queen.
In my present of past and future things,
time is porous, and I can feel cramps
migrating to my lower back. I have
a theory that the same gravity which binds
galaxies orients us in utero,
a precarious suspension held long enough
to wrestle stability from chaos.
But we can’t always be precise. Love, look
at the big picture and just tell me
how to capture light from the void, hold
the thread of everything as a child tends
her tiny cities like a queen of galaxies.
Liturgies of Flight
A day of small things unfolds with a wing-
span wide enough to lift a fledgling’s
drooping wing as I kneel on my untamed yard
to bury kitchen scraps, three feet away
from the beans and leafy greens, this corner
a eulogy to feathers and bird bones.
Everything is outbound, like winged seeds
and pollen even my colony of flightless
fruit flies. Some things are glory bound,
like an aircraft surviving landing on water
after colliding with a flock of birds.
Of all days, perhaps, today I need to believe
in how good things can work together, like a patch
of catnip breaking a young bird’s fall.
Interview
June 6th, 2026
California Poets Interview Series:
Aileen Cassinetto, Poet, Editor
interviewed by David Garyan
DG: With C. Sophia Ibardaloza you co-founded Paloma Press. What was the impetus behind doing so and could you speak a bit about the choice of name?
AC: Paloma Press was formally launched in 2016, but its origins trace back to 2008 when my sister and I worked on a small book arts project. At the time, Sophie was living in Texas and I thought working on a project would help us stay connected. I wrote a poem titled “La Paloma,” and she calligraphed and illustrated twenty copies, which we hand-bound and released as a limited edition. After that, we turned our attention to creating bespoke children’s books combining poems and illustrations, mostly for our nephews and nieces. Our early works allowed us to continue refining our craft and exploring the interplay of text and image. Over time, this practice naturally evolved into the publication of transformative literature by other writers, marking our transition toward a fully independent literary press. The name “Paloma” carries multiple meanings for us. It comes from my poem, my old street name, the hemline of a Filipiniana dress from the early twentieth century, and from birds long associated with messages and wayfinding. Those layers mirror what we wanted the press to be, which is a practice woven into civic and cultural life. Books were never just a pastime for us; growing up in the Philippines, they were the first place we learned that other worlds were possible, and publishing is a way of staying in the same conversation, just on the other side of it.
DG: Your passion for the environment goes beyond sentiment. You’ve co-edited an anthology, Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (2023), collaborated with Poets for Science, and the anthology led to the creation of the Dear Human project. Another anthology, The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders, was released last year. When did you become passionate about the environment and what are other ways poets can bring greater awareness to it?
AC: Ecological awareness came to me early, I grew up surrounded by water, and the natural world was simply part of how I understood life. Later, as an immigrant, shorelines, marshes, fault lines, and seasons helped me grow new roots in unfamiliar ground. That attentiveness deepened into something more urgent over time. In 2010, for instance, my husband and I wrote an article for Fellowship magazine (the oldest continuously published peace and justice magazine in the U.S.) contending that economic prosperity and environmental protection were not opposing forces but interdependent ones. We pointed out that clean energy policies like California’s AB 32 create jobs while reducing the long-term social and environmental costs of pollution and climate change. Our core argument is that you cannot care for the environment without caring for people, especially the most vulnerable.
My work with Dear Human at the Edge of Time and The Nature of Our Times placed poetry in direct conversation with science and public policy. What I’ve come to believe is that poems can function as thresholds, they invite people into complex, even overwhelming data through feeling, story, experience, and imagination. The role of the poet has never been only aesthetic. It has always been to tell the truth about what it means to be alive in a particular time and place, and right now, that means reckoning with what we can still save.
DG: Collaboration is an important aspect of your work. In this respect, you’ve written lyrics for Saunder Choi’s “Wide American Earth,” worked with mixed media artists, and done poetry installations. What do you love most about collaboration and do you have more upcoming projects in this respect?
AC: Collaboration takes me out of myself in the best way. For me, it disrupts habits and opens new ways of listening. Working with Saunder Choi has been honestly a dream come true, we’ve collaborated three times now, and I hope there’s more to come. Working with visual and mixed media artists on installations has been similarly revelatory, teaching me how differently words behave when they’re in conversation with image or place. What I love most is the humility collaboration demands. You have to genuinely trust other forms of creative intelligence, let go of control, and allow the work to become something neither of you could have made separately. I’m especially drawn to collaborations that bring poetry into non-arts spaces because those encounters remind me that poetry isn’t a rarefied thing. It’s relational, adaptable, transformative, and it meets people where they are. The anthologies Dear Human at the Edge of Time and The Nature of Our Times grew out of exactly those kinds of relationships. One of my greatest joys was collaborating with Luisa A. Igloria, David Hassler, Jeremy Hoffman, Phil Levin, the Poets for Science team, and so many more, whose expertise, curiosity, generosity, and commitment deepened my understanding of what poetry can do in the world. As for what’s coming, there are a few projects I’m not quite ready to talk about yet, what I can say is that the work keeps expanding in ways I didn’t entirely plan, which feels like exactly the right thing.
DG: Between 2019 and 2022, you served as the poet laureate of San Mateo County. What projects, events, or readings did you organize to enrich the literary culture of the region?
AC: My approach as poet laureate was guided by how poetry might show up more fully in people’s everyday lives. I focused on building structures that could hold many voices at once, especially those not always centered in literary spaces. During this time, I was also named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, which deepened the resources and reach available to the work.
The umbrella for much of this work was Speak Poetry in San Mateo County, a countywide initiative that produced over 120 events and platformed more than 400 poets and artists. Programming spanned public readings and workshops, youth mentorship, interdisciplinary collaborations, print anthologies, annual campaigns for county and city proclamations of April as National Poetry Month, and a digital archive documenting San Mateo County poets, their works, and civic contributions. The link to the project is the following: www.speakpoetry.org
A significant part of the role involved convening rather than curating alone, helping bring Bay Area poets laureate together for the first regional convening, supporting a virtual book festival during a time of isolation, and creating space for intergenerational and cross-cultural exchange through libraries, colleges, and community organizations. During the pandemic, poetry became a tool for care, and community poems, open mics, and anthologies helped address grief, isolation, frontline labor, and collective uncertainty.
Youth advocacy ran through everything. I worked alongside local agencies to help establish youth poet laureate and poet-in-residence programs across several cities, and to mentor emerging poets and youth arts leaders, several have since gone on to earn significant recognition, including a California Arts Council Emerging Artist Fellow, a California Youth Poet Laureate, a city youth poet laureate, a writer-in-residence, an environmental justice scholarship awardee, and a county young woman of excellence. These weren’t outcomes I can take sole credit for, but I’m proud to have been part of the ecosystem that helped them grow.
Environmental engagement emerged organically and found its fullest expression in the San Mateo County Youth Ecopoetry Project. The project reached over 200 students through readings, workshops, group poems, and short poetry films. It culminated on June 30, 2022 with a filmed roundtable, “The Future Is Poetry,” which became an official selection in the Lift-Off Filmmaker Sessions; a shorter version was featured in the Nature & Culture Poetry Film Festival at Kulturhuset Islands Brygge Cultural Center in Copenhagen. The project was also recognized as one of 56 initiatives at the intersection of arts and the climate crisis across the United States, highlighted in the Fall/Winter 2022 edition of Arts Link magazine by Americans for the Arts.
In collaboration with Filoli Historic House and Garden, I also helped establish a poetry program now in its sixth year comprising an annual haiku contest, place-based poetry installation, and an ecopoetry award, to engage people of all ages around culture, place, belonging, and ecology.
Filoli recently had me on their podcast to talk about this work, and you can listen by clicking this link:
Immediately following my laureateship, I conceptualized and directed the San Mateo County Youth Cultural Ambassadors, a pilot program for the San Mateo County Office of Arts and Culture, supporting youth artists in developing community-centered projects, which became a precursor to the current San Mateo County Youth Arts Fellowship Program.
Looking back, I see the role less as something I led and more as something I helped tend. The work was collaborative because it couldn’t have been any other way, and my hope was always to leave behind not just events, but relationships and infrastructures that could continue to grow long after my term ended.
DG: California has no shortage of beautiful nature. What are some of your favorite places?
AC: San Mateo County is home now. Half Moon Bay, for instance, has a liminal quality where land and ocean remind you that borders are provisional. Filoli is a living archive of care, and a place I keep returning to through our long partnership. I also love our parks here, especially Edgewood’s serpentine grassland and Huddart’s old-growth redwoods.
Santa Clara County is where my family settled after immigrating from the Philippines in the 70s; my family is mostly there (my mother has 10 siblings), and it’s the landscape of my earliest American memories. Some of my favorite parks are Stevens Creek with its reservoir and open hills; Vasona, an almost tender, unhurried park with a gorgeous lake, and my family’s picnic place; the Municipal Rose Garden in San Jose which is both beautiful and deeply generous.
Sonora is its own California entirely. My husband’s family has ranched those Sierra Nevada foothills for five generations, and being welcomed into that history gave me a deeper appreciation for the Old West not as myth but as something lived and ongoing.
DG: What are places that, perhaps, are in need of greater protection?
AC: Often, it’s the in-between places which are harder to romanticize, like wetlands and marshes, Cooley Landing in East Palo Alto, for instance, and the scrubby urban open spaces, and the working landscapes that don’t look like a nature documentary. Protection, I think, means listening to the people who live closest to these places, like community members who know the land through daily life.
DG: A fascinating concept in Filipino culture is “Balikbayan,” with its double-connotation of gift-giving boxes, but also Philippine government’s program encouraging their nationals living abroad to return home. Given the political climate in the US, are you seeing more people choosing to go back?
AC: “Balikbayan” is a concept I find myself returning to often. Personally, I don’t know many people who have gone back because of the current political climate specifically, what I see more often are people returning to retire, or Filipino Americans who wish to know the land their parents or grandparents left behind. The political conversations are real, but return is rarely that simple. Immigration status, family obligations, economic realities, children who have only ever known this country tend to complicate even the strongest desire to leave. And then there are the roots you didn’t plan to grow. Before you know it, this place has become yours too and you’ve built a life that has genuinely taken hold. There’s also the deeper complication that I sit with myself which is the fear of returning to a place you may no longer know, or that may no longer know you. This is all to say that what I notice more than any exodus is a reimagining of home as something plural. Many Filipinos I know don’t think of belonging as a choice between here and there, but of sustaining connection across distance. In some ways, the balikbayan box has always been the Filipino immigrant’s condition, sending pieces of yourself back to keep the thread alive across an ocean.
DG: Your most recent collection, An Immigrant’s Guide to Navigating Borders & Bodies of Water, is a powerful testament to issues of identity, displacement, and migration, often approached from a personal perspective. The collection connects past and present using images of maps, themes of movement, along with powerful lines like “Salt and bone, I am ocean and uncharted.” How much editing was needed to arrive at a point where you could talk about migration so personally yet at the same time make it very relatable to all readers?
AC: I’ll be honest, relatability wasn’t really the objective. I wasn’t orienting the collection toward a reader. I was trying to be as truthful as I could be while still protecting what needed protecting, and I was trusting the work to find whoever needed it. And underneath all of that was the ongoing question of craft, learning to recognize patterns and where I fit within them, knowing where to be relentless, and when to finally trust that the collection had found its shape. A book is its own kind of argument, and the order of poems, the way one piece sets up or unsettles the next, all of that is how a collection thinks.
DG: What’s been a book which you’ve read recently that made a deep impact?
AC: Three books, actually, or rather, three returns. I revisited Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass for an ecotheology class, and coming back to it felt like entering a familiar landscape. What continues to move me is how this book doesn’t argue so much as it teaches through attention which is something I keep reaching for in my own work, too. I’ve also returned to Renato Constantino’s The Philippines: A Past Revisited, a book that shaped me years ago and revealed itself differently on return. It is unapologetically corrective, and reading it again, I was struck by how much of what he names such as the costs of historical amnesia remains urgent. History is not static, it presses on the present in ways that are felt before they’re understood. And then there’s the Bible, which I’ve read many times before, but this time I’m older, and that changes everything. What once felt like narrative now feels like poetry. I find myself reading more slowly, sitting longer with certain passages. There’s something about returning to a foundational text at this stage of life that humbles you. You realize how much you’ve changed and the book hasn’t.
DG: What are you working on these days?
AC: This year marks Paloma Press’ 10th anniversary, and a year ago I was holding a very ambitious vision for what that milestone might look like. What I’ve learned since then is that not every season is meant for expansion. Some are meant for tending, reviewing what has been built, understanding what it has cost, and allowing space for rest and recalibration. I’m also reflecting on Paloma Press as an archive of relationships, collaborations, risks, and ideas, and considering how best to honor that history as we move forward. There are projects quietly in development, but I’m less interested right now in speed or scale than in alignment. I want whatever comes next, whether a poem, a book, or a collaboration, to feel necessary rather than merely possible. That, for me, feels like a sustainable way to imagine the future, and I think, a more hopeful one.
Author Bio:
Aileen Cassinetto is a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and winner of the 2025 Foley Poetry Prize. The author of An Immigrant’s Guide to Navigating Borders and Bodies of Water (2025), she is also co-editor of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (2023) and The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders (2025).
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