The Genesis Issue / September 12, 2026

Humbled, Founding Verse, The Locked Chest, Piling On

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Welcome to The Genesis Issue, where something starts. It did not exist before. Now it is here. That is all that happens, and it is enough.

Inside, my poem "Symphony of Existence" sizes up the whole universe and still can't dodge a dinner check. In Echoes, I meet a bishop who wrote Texas's first poem before Texas was even a country. In Testaments, I sit with a poet who sewed her life's work shut and showed it to no one. And in Devices, I show you how a stubborn and turns a hurricane's wreckage into an unbroken breath.
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Scroll on. Something here started without waiting for permission.

Day one,
Jason
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​jasonzguest.com​

In this issue:

Featured Poem Symphony of Existence A cosmic-scale poem that ends on a very human joke. Echoes The Bishop Who Named Texas First Before Texas had a country, it had a poem. Testaments She Built a Beginning No One Was Meant to See A poet built her life's work for no audience. Devices And Then, and Then, and Then How the smallest word can build an entire world.

Featured Poem

Symphony of Existence

Symphony of Existence
​By Jason Z Guest

I am the harmony
of a billion atoms
of billions of harmonies
like me.
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Beyond, the harmony
of a billion galaxies
of billions of stars
unseen.
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My kayak riding
a billion molecules,
of billions more flowing to
the sea.
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And yet you scoff to say
you have this all figured out,
then pass the dinner check over
to me?

About Jason →

Echoes

The Bishop Who Named Texas First

On this date in 1802, a Spanish priest named Primo Feliciano Marín y Porras was ordained Bishop of Linares, a diocese in Mexico that then stretched north into Spanish Texas, a province he had likely never set foot in before receiving the appointment from Rome. Sometime during an apostolic visit to that province, he wrote an ode to the land itself, a poem history now credits as the earliest known work to take Texas as its subject.

Marín's ode praised the plains, the rivers, and the wild orange groves of a place most of Europe had never seen, and it caught on among the ranchers of Tejas long before Texas belonged to any nation Marín would have recognized.

Potter's nineteenth-century English translation survives in a handbook of Texas literary history alongside a second, competing translation, each claiming to carry the bishop's original closer to the truth. Texas, it turns out, has been getting reinvented in translation since its very first stanza.

Read the full ode as it has survived, translation by translation.

Read the Ode →

Testaments

She Built a Beginning No One Was Meant to See

Between 1858 and 1864, Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 800 poems and began sewing them, by hand, into small homemade booklets her later editors would call fascicles. She copied each poem in careful handwriting onto folded stationery, bound the pages with twine, and told almost no one they existed. During her lifetime she allowed only a handful of poems into print, and even those were altered by editors uneasy with her strange dashes and stranger rhymes.

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Dickinson rarely left her family's house in Amherst, Massachusetts, in her final decades, keeping up with the outside world mostly through letters passed to visitors from behind a door left open only a crack. She was building an entire private cosmology. Hers was a body of work meant to exist complete before anyone else was allowed to see it, and she was in no hurry to be finished. She died in 1886, at fifty-five, having published only seven poems in her lifetime, most of them anonymously and several rewritten by editors without her consent.

A week after her death, her sister Lavinia opened a chest in Dickinson's bedroom and found forty hand-bound fascicles holding nearly 1,800 poems, a body of work larger than almost any other American poet had produced, built entirely without a single reader in mind. Lavinia refused to burn them. The first volume appeared in 1890. A complete, accurate edition, restoring Dickinson's own eccentric dashes and capitalization, did not exist until 1998.

What Dickinson's life proves is that a genesis can sit sealed in a box for decades, waiting for someone to open it.

Step inside the fascicles she sewed shut.

Read More →

Devices

And Then, and Then, and Then

Polysyndeton is the deliberate repetition of a conjunction, usually and, between clauses that would ordinarily take a comma. Instead of finishing a list and moving on, the sentence keeps opening a new door, refusing to let the reader settle. Nothing in the sequence outranks anything else. Every clause simply arrives, one after another, with equal weight and no hurry toward a conclusion, the way a heartbeat refuses to skip ahead to the good part of a story.

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It is famously the rhythm of the opening chapter of Genesis in the Holy Bible, but writers have used it in far less solemn settings too. Ernest Hemingway reached for the same stacked and to describe a Florida town waking after a hurricane in "After the Storm," piling detail on detail until the wreckage feels like one long, overwhelming breath.

That refusal to rank one detail above another is what makes the device useful for any beginning. A first day, or a morning after a storm, is made of many equal arrivals, and polysyndeton simply holds them all at once.

Bob Dylan reached for the same structure to build an ending rather than a beginning. The final verse of "Masters of War" opens six of its eight lines with the same repeated and, each line adding another act to a death watch without ever letting one image conclude the thought before the next one arrives. Where Genesis and Hemingway use the device to pile up a world coming into being, Dylan uses it to pile up an ending.

See what else this rhythm can carry.

Keep Reading →