Artist of the Month January 2026 - Featured Artist - Sasha Elise Tobin
About the Artist -
Sasha Elise Tobin is a poet and educator. She currently resides in Keene, New Hampshire. She is actively involved in the poetry and slam communities of Slam Free of Die in Manchester, Untitled Open Mic in Lowell. She was a member of the 2025 Slam Free or Die Slam Poetry Team, and she is in the qualifier for this year’s Mill City Speaks Team. She released her first self published work, Spiritual Catstache, in 2025.
When she is not working on poetry, you can find Sasha reading banned books with children, drinking too much coffee, hiking, dancing, or engaging in some other whimsical venture.
Featured Poems -
An Ode to Kastle Distrakto
This is for letters we burnt in the sink,
for the possum that lived in the basement,
and the straight razor we used to give ourselves haircuts.
For the concertina, guitar, and fiddle
playing Misfits’ covers into the wind.
Jess says all twenty somethings
are performative about youth.
And we performed ours
by dumpster diving and dancing in the living room.
We spent years holding our friends
as tight as mason jar lids.
We had to,
some of us were living at strange intersections
between our bodies and sexual assault scars
at crossroads between our parents
and dreams we could barely touch.
So we gathered in one large old house
and filled each other up
with homemade kimchi and kombucha.
We knew we were worth the fermentation time;
all we needed was a shelf where we could sit and age.
We needed people to tend to the wild cultures inside us.
Some days, we puppy piled on the couch,
as though our bodies
were breathing weighted blankets.
Other days, we dressed in sequined outfits
just to order coffee.
The Queer super hero squad
armed with Foucault and notebooks,
we were ready to dismantle Capitalism
with cartoons, poetry,
and organic homemade jam.
We were prepared to disrupt the patriarchy
with funny hats and tinfoil unicorn horns.
Unsurprisingly, we only save ourselves from boredom.
But if they had paid us for our whims,
we could have made the world better with slow dancing.
We could have made the world better
holding open forums about human sexuality
and feminism.
Instead, we broke bottles
and went roof jumping through Asheville.
Instead, we went skinny dipping by waterfalls.
We sat in front stoop confessionals
beside a giant white magnolia tree.
Political radicals congregated
to reveal secrets,
plan revolutions,
and hand rolled their cigarettes
beneath that sweet scent.
We were looking for ourselves
but kept finding glitter in our hair.
Perhaps Jess was right about youth being performative,
but this is where we learned the importance of washing the dishes
even if the floor was barely mopped.
This is where we learned that shouting was unnecessary
unless it was about remembering song lyrics.
That conflict resolution
was about honoring the wild cultures inside someone
without letting the whole house stink
with misplaced judgements and unspoken resentments.
That love is about recognizing someone’s hard day
making dinner for them, lighting candles, holding their hand.
There are lovers who will never understand
the truths and contradictions,
that each of them unfurled in me
not as a weapon to scar flesh
but an edge sharpening intention.
I don’t need to go back, but
as my flesh becomes a wrinkled manuscript,
I want an ode to the punkhouse kimchi.
To honor the hands that wrapped me up in hugs.
I want to honor the wild cultures that gathered there
and grew inside me.
I want to honor the sharpened flavors
that were honed.
—————————————————————————————————————
Pickles and Preserves
After the summer fruit is picked,
peaches, heavy with the taste of sunshine,
raspberries, that glisten with rain,
they are boiled down with sugar.
Each jar set and sealed to take us through the winter,
and I cannot help but seal the memories that grew in the rain and sun
of that wild spring and summer.
Sealed shut and labeled;
stacked on the cellar shelves
of some corner inside of me.
So much of this world is can not be set in vinegar
or sugar to last beyond the winter.
But when you opened the jar of my heart
full of fireflies
and snow
full of mountain songs accompanied by autoharp.
When you opened in me
a jar full of oak trees and small rivers rolling over stones,
I saw you swim in the deeper hollows.
I heard you sing like a howling dog, like a frog in mud.
I saw you take off your shoes and glasses.
I saw you take off all the unnecessary garments;
you waded up to your waist.
The light glistened and held you
like the wind holds the birds.
When we forage for those mulberries and raspberries,
I did not know they would cook down to this smile set on your face.
I didn’t know that it would carry with it
The nights I traced the freckles on your back.
The nights I discovered on your flesh
the eagle,
the pole star,
and the bear.
Later, the planets shook under our slow dancing feet
from the fishes past the virgin huntress
under the floorboards and through the bedposts.
I didn’t know that in you
I could open a shimmering cosmos
I didn’t know that in you
there was a forest glowing in moonlight
or that cranes stood in the wetlands of your heart.
Their necks and wings moving to a rhythm
mysteriously singing inside.
Their heads turned upward
squalling in the moonlight.
They set you to dance upon the water.
My love,
I know this world is can not be set in vinegar
or sugar.
I know winter is hungry for what is left.
I know some of these starlight swoons will sour in the cellar.
It is why I want to open the tender in you.
I want to open the sour and sweet
from their sealed lids.
Show me the moss that grows on your forest floors
Show me the birds that sing in your heart,
the places that you swim,
and feel you are floating in the sky.
This life that lingers as jelly jars and preserves
This life that we hope to share
with a sweetness as clear as a blue sky
with a sweetness as soft
as our fingers wrapped
in one another’s
I open this life, because it is worth tasting
And remembering how the symphony of flavors melted on the tongue.