Other People’s Poems
Hartford Flavor Company
Hartford
April 3, 2026
Hosted by WNPR’s Chion Wolf, Other People’s Poems is as straightforward a concept as it sounds. People gather on the first Friday of the month at Hartford Flavor Company to read poetry. There are only two rules. First, you must recite a poem written by someone else. Second, if the performer manages to recite the entire poem from memory, they win a complimentary loofah (yes, the shower loofah). The atmosphere and the potential for prizes make for a fun night that whips between reflective and irreverent.
One of the readers, Sarah Johnson, spoke about her personal life. She’s undergoing a full hysterectomy very soon, and shared a poem dedicated to the procedure. She read “poem to my uterus” by Lucile Clifton. She uses the comparison of the uterus to a sock to deliver a devastating closing to the poem:
where can i go
barefoot
without you
where can you go
without me
I’ve known multiple women who have dealt with the health issues that a cantankerous uterus can cause. To a person, getting a hysterectomy seemed like an extreme, last-ditch decision, even for the women who were done having children save for an accident. Even the simple biological capacity to have children is hardwired into our cultural understanding of femininity; it plays out in women postponing or even foregoing such a procedure for years.
There were no such pressures when I got my vasectomy. I was 22 years old, right in the prime of baby-making age. I’d heard that some doctors decline to perform permanent birth control on such a young person, but again, that was something I’d heard referenced about women. I told the doctor I wanted one, and I was scheduled right away. No one around me made much of a big deal about it. In fact, amongst my peers, it was celebrated: sex with no kids! The dream realized!
What a world, right? Where social constructs lead to the celebration of the end of fertility for one person and mourning for another, based solely on whether you have a Y chromosome or not.
On the other hand, the reigning champion of loofahs, Joe O’Brien, chose a more humorous but still serious poem. Joe had managed to earn a whopping 28 loofahs across the 45 volumes of Other People’s Poems before he stepped up to recite “I’m Dating a Man Who’s Married” by Aaron Smith. Let’s just take this one from the top:
to a man who’s dating a man who’s
married to a woman. The husband
of the man I’m dating knows he’s
dating me and my boyfriend knows his
husband is dating the man who’s
married to the woman who does not
know her husband is gay. The guy
she’s married to—the boyfriend
of my boyfriend’s husband—just told
his mom he’s gay and she’s happy
because she never liked his wife
I had to diagram that one to really understand it. Infidelity is a strange crime, because it’s never funny, unless of course it is; it’s never justified, unless of course it is; and no one cheats, except of course everyone does. I’ve never cheated on, but I’ve cheated with. That might be a distinction without a difference, but I’ve always felt it’s the responsibility of the people within the relationship to respect the boundaries of it, not mine. It’s a massive ego boost, to think that you’re so hot and wonderful that another person is willing to betray someone they love for you. I greatly enjoyed how that diabolical energy courses through this poem.
The universality of experience is what grounds poetry and makes it so revealing even when we least expect it. The experiences don’t have to be the same, just similar enough, and we can end up finding ourselves through the poems of others.
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