If this Poetic Interlude feels like a message or mirror, share it with someone who is looking to think about rest differently.
How do you deeply care for the land to ground your living self within the collective of all living things? In this Poetic Interlude, Mai-Linh Hong shares her poem “Harvest Moon with Wildfire” (from her forthcoming debut collection, Continental Drift, and originally published in Waxwing Issue 34, Fall 2025).
Creative expression is a portal to rest as liberation. Creatives, including poets, show us how to embrace our humanity and act on our truths. We in The Rest of Us community view this as a deep connection to one’s own agency — our definition of rest.
Settle into the work of Mai-Linh Hong and even explore your own creativity, which we define as liberatory rest.
Poem: “Harvest Moon with Wildfire”
We have slept through most of the Anthropocene, waking to sirens.
Now, look at the smoky season seething with wild eye.
Autumn tells the orange moon to come back sober.
Goldfinch glares from his balsam swing, his wing singed.
Sky rages between silences.
Berated children, we walk on eggshells.
When I was little, we made lanterns carried on a stick.
I trusted flame to lodge within its paper cage.
I think of fire differently these days.
My son, my moon, will one day be his own protector.
I have learned to live without another’s apology.
I will learn to mother with the earth ablaze.
Reflections
I wrote this poem in the wake of an especially dramatic wildfire season in California, where I now live, thinking about the dysfunction in America’s relationship to the environment and what this means for raising my young son, whose generation is growing up with the consequences. Indigenous ways of managing land and fire have been undermined by settler-colonialism, to everyone’s detriment, but there is ancestral wisdom and indigenous science that we can choose to honor for our collective survival.
What ancestral wisdom do you embrace?
How do you deeply care for the land, not property, to ground your living self within the collective of all living things?
Mai-Linh Hong is a Vietnamese American refugee poet and literary scholar. Her debut collection, Continental Drift, won the Trio Award and will be published by Trio House Press in 2026. Poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, ANMLY, Wildness, Waxwing, and elsewhere, and her writing has been supported by Voices of Our Nation, Tin House, and the Vermont Studio Center. She is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (U. of California Press, 2021). Raised in Virginia, she now lives in California’s Central Valley and teaches literature at UC-Merced.
Website: mai-linhhong.com
Publications: Waxwing
The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (UC Press, 2021)
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Meet the Host:
Dana Tenille Weekes
Dana Tenille Weekes made the conscious decision to live in a mindset of rest as self-liberation after nearly 15 years as a lawyer-lobbyist in Washington, DC. In 2020, Dana faced the darkest period of her life, which eventually led her to resign from a top global law firm and take a year-long journey of rest in 2022.
In 2023, Dana launched Thrive Architects, a strategic advising and professional development firm building advocacy, organizational health, and well-being platforms for organizations, communities, and people to thrive.
The Rest of Us podcast is one way Dana is building community for professionals and advocates on the brink of burnout to think about rest differently. If you’re interested in embracing rest as liberation, especially after the podcast episode ends, join our community where we converse, connect, cultivate, and lean into our creativity.