Hailing from Bali, Indonesia, and Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish Territories, Cynthia Dewi Oka is a New Jersey-based poet, editor, activist, mom, and the author of Nomad of Salt and Hard Water.
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Magazine“Our only refuge”
In the wake of the economic meltdown of 2008, what does unemployment teach us about who we are and what our lives mean?
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MagazineAmulet
when time is army marshalled / against you starved and alone / I write in celebration your survival / each molecule of courage you collect / sunrise and sundown.
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Magazineexperiments in freedom
There is a mass grave here. The broken skins of some of the fruit reveal eyes, nasal cartilage, thumbs.
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MagazineHomeplace as revolutionary front
Homeplace is where we are grown and raised into social beings, where we receive our earliest definitions of humanity, where we first learn to recognize love, violence, justice and pain. Yet it has persisted in our imagination as a private sphere of emotional and material dependence, rather than as a front in revolutionary struggle.
