Every once in a while, the universe gives you a tug. Not a gentle tap on the shoulder—a full-on gravitational yank that pulls you out of whatever orbit you thought you were in.
That’s what happened with the newest episode of Bubble & Squeak.
I started out thinking I was doing a simple story about menstrual cups. You know, the kind of lighthearted “Peterson learns about a very normal thing embarrassingly late in life” tale. But once you follow a thread like that, it drags you into bigger questions:
-
Who gets access to the products they need?
-
How many girls are missing school because they can’t afford pads?
-
Why is period poverty still a global crisis in 2025?
So I followed the thread. It pulled me through Connecticut food pantries, a refugee camp in Kakuma, and across conversations with women who are out there doing the real work: Christine Garde Denning, Mary Maker, Fran Stoffer, and my cousin Mona—each in her own way shaping the world for women and girls in need.
And then, because this is Bubble & Squeak, things take a cosmic turn.
Suddenly I’m in Richmond, Virginia, under a wobbling sky, volunteering as Dark Matter (yes, really) in an interplanetary ritual welcoming Earth’s next North Star. Artist George Ferrandi’s long-brewing project Jump!Star cracks open something ancient, playful, and wildly hopeful. It’s not every day you help carry a glowing sculpture in a ceremony meant for people who won’t be born for another thousand years.
Also in this episode: a gorgeous, unsettling reading of Catherine Pierce’s climate poem Anthropocene Pastoral. You can find more of her work at CatherinePiercePoet.com and her creative community at Studio & Craft.
So yes, this one stretches—from bathrooms to galaxies, from period products to Polaris’s successor.
But that’s the thing about a gravitational pull: once it hooks you, you’re going wherever it leads.
🎧 Listen to Bubble and Squeak “Gravitational Pull” now on Spotify or wherever you get podcasts
Comments