UCLA Journal of Radiation Oncology FALL 2024 and ANNUAL REPORT - Flipbook - Page 24
UCLA RADIATION ONCOLOGY JOURNAL
a breakdown / in the mall today, and when the security guard / tried to help her,
what I felt was all of us / peeking from her purse as she threw it / across the floor
into Forever 21.” The poem ends with “some of us reaching / our wings to her and
some of us flying away.” This sort of awareness of others in not innate in all, but
for Agodon, her first instinct is always “to be useful.” And with poetry, Agodon
uses her voice, can “take what I can’t control emotionally and turn it into art.” The
“monologue of anxiety” in her head has become a poem, she says, “and now this
poem is going out into the world, and somebody else who might be experiencing a
similar mental health issue or anxiety or depression feels less alone.”
I ask if how she “presents”—a beautiful blonde always smiling with red lipstick (I
admit that this is based off my take on her from her social media and other media
such as interviews)—is truly how she is. She is without lipstick as we talk, but she
knows what I’m after and immediately quotes from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,
51”: “I contain multitudes.” But others seeing her as I do is the responsibility of those
who see her that way. “I would say awkward poet with glasses,” she laughs. “I am a
very joyous person and curious. I have a lot of characteristics of children, which can
be either people really love it or really dislike it, because I’m always interested in the
world around me; I’m always looking at the world for smaller bits of it. But I have
friends who call me a Morticia Addams because that is also a part of me; I am very
interested in the dark side and thinking about what is happening to this planet.”
The poem, “Hold Still,” recounts a drive with a NASA scientist friend. “...you asked
me if I’d pull the wings / off a butterfly for a million dollars. I said no. // I said no, not
because I wasn’t ravenous / for money, but because I’ve never been / interested in
mishandling any life but my own.” When I bring up the poem, she wonders aloud if
the creatures we are scared of or want to harm would be approached the same way
if they were cute or beautiful. But Agodon is one to move or leave a spider rather
than kill it, despite her fear of them, which resonates in the final lines of the poem:
“You shook your head and asked me a similar question / about pulling the legs off
spiders— / One million dollars, you said // believing that we choose who we hunt /
based on their beauty, because the things that frighten us / are easier to kill.” This
comes back to her belief that all things are connected. “We don’t necessarily think
about the living things that were there before us, before we build our building or
strip mall, or before we clear cut an area. We don’t consider. Oh, there might be a lot
of black bears walking through a residential neighborhood and cougars and bobcats,
because we’ve just completely obliterated, you know, where they were living. I’m
always thinking about that.”
This dichotomy of living with nature in an urban setting, too, comes through in her
poems. In “Lightvessel,” “When I struggle in a diorama / of traffic, I become the
silver orb / in a city’s pinball machine,” a feeling common for many in Los Angeles.
But the poem is about so much more, ends with: “I’ve forgotten to pack a lunch, /
forgotten how much I ache for anyone / to rest their words against my lips.” Which
is a return to the mental health aspect of her work. But, Agodon tells me, “The act
of writing a poem is hopeful. If everyone woke up in the morning and wrote one,
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