An Interview with Osmani R. Ochoa
Author of How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse
by Jack Giauor
Osmani R. Ochoa is a queer Mexican-Xicano poet and longtime local and national organizer for immigrant and worker rights. On July 31, 2026, their chapbook How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse was released by Abode Press. Inspired by Osmani’s lifelong battle with asthma, this book offers a migrant futurist meditation on breath (and breathlessness) centered in climate justice, corporate accountability, and the U.S. immigrant experience. I had an opportunity to interview Osmani before their manuscript’s release, and was able to have a thought-provoking discussion with them about the deeper themes embedded in their work.
How to Survive an Asthma Attack in a Climate Apocalypse by Osmani Ochoa.
Adobe Press, 2026.
Jack Giaour: The scope of this manuscript is huge—the first section literally begins at the beginning of the universe with the big bang, the middle sections begin with the “birth” of the speaker, the anchoring of the speaker into a physical, earthly body, and move through the speaker’s life in relation to that body to the final section, which ends the spiritual release from the body into the “starry desert cosmos.” How did this massive story begin?
Osmani R. Ochoa: The collection is more than just breath and breathlessness. Thank you for noting that. As the chapbook points out in different ways throughout the collection, a big part of it is about how breath itself gets caged through human-made systems and structures. From borders and deportation to empire, to machismo and heteropatriarchy to climate change, these violent forces shape our existence and our bodies in very specific ways.
I hadn’t really thought of this little chapbook as a “massive story” the way you’ve contextualized it, lol, but I totally see what you mean. I mean, I do start with the big bang after all and end with a very dramatic body-horroresque exit and exhale, and in between, we travel to a future where new technologies and gadgets exist to help asthmatic bodies survive an apocalyptic world.
All that to say, I definitely did have an intentional arc around breath, asthma, and lungs as the throughline. But I kept returning to those same themes to explore different possibilities and dimensions within them: starting with the huge, expansive cosmic scope of the opening poem, then moving into the specificity of my childhood and family, then of course the queered love and heartbreak, humor and satire, spirituality, futurism and dystopian science fiction, and finally ending with this release, this exhale, and the (body) horror of it all. I guess I did pack a lot into a chapbook, lol.
So yes, I definitely did have a narrative in the back of my mind that I wanted to follow, one that reflects my humanity and my multiplicity.
JG: Regarding your identity as poet/writer and your identity as organizer/activist, do you see these identities as separate, or braided? Either way, how do you negotiate that intersection?
ORO: In the early 2010s I used to write so much “protest poetry” as an outlet to all the injustice that I was seeing in my role as a community organizer in Tucson, Arizona, working to free workers and trans and queer people from immigration detention camps. My poetry felt so integrated within my life’s purpose, which was/is fighting for a better world, basically. And in more recent times, I have grappled with this question of what is the role of the poet during these (particularly fascist) times and now I’m like, why sweat over this question? I am already all these things at once. There is no separating them out. I am a human being living on planet Earth that cares and I show that care in the writing, in community organizing, and in being in relation with other humans and the planet that sustains us. Saul Williams helped me rethink this question during a recent reading where I heard him speak. He reframed it from asking what the role of the writer or poet is to asking: What makes us human, and what is the role of the human being in these times? So, it’s a much bigger question, one that can’t be reduced to just the writer; it’s about our responsibility as community members living in a society that was designed with so much inequity and injustice.
JG: When you’re working in multiple languages, how do you determine the tongue of the poem you’re working on? Do you sit down with the intention of writing a poem in English or Spanish, or does it happen purely organically?
ORO: At this point in my life, most of my thinking happens in English or Spanglish. To write fully 100 percent in Spanish, I do have to intentionally shift my brain into that space, but it also depends a lot on who I imagine my audience to be.
For example, there’s a poem in the collection that’s a letter to my mom called “Querida Amá,” and that poem had to be completely in Spanish from the very beginning. It would have felt almost unserious, or even inadequate, to write a letter to my mom in a language she wouldn’t understand, you know? Even if it is rhetorical or a monologue. Interestingly, I also consider it one of the saddest poems in the collection.
The other poem I consider the saddest is also entirely in Spanish, which connects to another point I wanted to address: depending on the emotion I was trying to communicate, sometimes one language simply had the words and expressions I needed in a way the other didn’t. When I wanted to go deeper into grief, to describe a profound sense of lament, sadness, or loss, I could find those feelings better expressed through Spanish. So it wasn’t really a conscious choice, it also happened naturally.
A lot of that comes from my parents’ music too, especially the ranchera genre, and the luminaries blaring in the house throughout my childhood—from Juan Gabriel, to Beatriz Adriana, Pepe Aguilar, Vicente Fernández, and so many more. Through their songs and me relistening to them in my writing process, I was able to tap into a particular kind of sadness, longing, and musicality that also shapes my poetic imagery. I don’t think I could have captured those emotions, or they would not have punched the gut in the same way, had I written those poems in English.
JG: Since the poems in this book are so closely connected, it feels strange to pull individual poems out from the whole. But I did feel myself connecting particularly strongly with “Asthma (it gets harder to breathe),” and “breathtaking (ode to your hands),” and I think what’s striking to me about these two poems in particular is how they each connect queerness (and specifically queer sexual intimacy) with breathlessness, but in two very different ways.“Asthma (it gets harder to breathe)” has a fearful edge to it. The speaker’s grief is so deeply intertwined with their breathlessness that that breathlessness feels dangerous, truly deadly, and thus the speaker’s grief also feels deadly. But in “breathtaking (ode to your hands),” breathlessness becomes something brave, something transformative, even something liberatory. This mini-arc is just one of many ways in which this manuscript is a poetics of the body. How do you situate queerness and/or queer identity within that poetics? Is there a relationship between the“transgressive” nature of queer sexuality and the transborder ethos central to a migrant futurist imagining? Do you feel that the power of poetry is only imaginative, or is there a way for the imagined experience and the physical to meaningfully intersect?
ORO: Breathlessness as a sign of living . . . yes! I didn’t want asthma and breathlessness to exist only as something negative, or to frame myself as someone who was only victimized by it in every moment of my life. I wanted to explore how breathlessness could also be connected to something beyond an ending, beyond a feeling of near-death experiences.
I think my friend Nadia Choudhury really influenced this thinking by sharing something she learned from her mentor, the iconic Rigoberto González: that there have to be moments of release. It’s rare that every moment of our lives is purely intense, dramatic, or sad all the time. We also have to make room for the moments that make us whole, that remind us of our humanity, because those are the moments that keep us going. So I wanted to lean into that too: the moments when breath and breathlessness gave me life, joy, and pleasure.
And to that, I’d also add that yes, this collection is an examination of, and an experience through, the queer body and queer breath. The queerness, whether explicitly named or not, is always present. Gloria Anzaldúa taught me that queerness is also about being othered as ‘alien’—not only in terms of borders, ethnicity, immigration status, and language, but also through gender and sexuality, and all the ways we’re marked as different. That’s where my politics and poetics of resistance come from: those lived, embodied experiences.
JG: Can you speak to the relationship between the way these poems are arranged on the page and the way these poems are read out loud? Do you intentionally try to guide the breath of the reader on the page, or do you want the experience of speaking, reading, and hearing these poems to be necessarily different? Is the arrangement of the poem on the page ultimately a choice made around sound and performance, or is that choice based more in visual aesthetic? Or something else entirely?
ORO: There is definitely an intention behind how I hoped to guide the way the poems are read. I tried doing that through line breaks, caesura, and white space. There are poems where I was intentionally mimicking my asthmatic breathing patterns and creating moments where the reader might need to pause to breathe along with me.
I think you can see that throughout the collection. Some examples are the slashes in “Self-portrait with Asthma / Inspector Gadget,” the fragmentation and pacing in “A Brief History of Asthma,” or the jarring line-break intensity in “Self-portrait with Asthma / I’m Hungry.”
Overall, I think it was a combination of thinking about how the poem would sound and how it would look on the page, using both the visual and sonic elements to signal the ways in which asthma can appear, move, and sound throughout this collection, both on and beyond the page, if that makes sense.
JG: The title poem offers a very dark, cyberpunk vision of the future. But as a title for the manuscript,“how to survive an asthma attack in a climate apocalypse” is one that rings hopeful. Elsewhere in the book, body-horroresque scenes of hospital rooms and respirators are balanced against the protection of vaccines and the“rebirth” offered by corrective surgery for the speaker’s clubfoot. Can you speak to the role of technology in a collectivist, liberatory vision of the future? Is there a place for biotechnology in a society that isn’t built on exploitation?
ORO: I do envision a biotechnological future that serves the people. But that won’t just come out of the blue, or because those in power wake up one day and have a change of heart. It will come from a political struggle between two very different visions over the kind of world we want to live in. And that world to me looks like one that is not owned by billionaires and corporations or driven by a profit-motive and real-estate settler colonialism. We need a world rooted in care and dignity and inclusion and solidarity and cooperation. It’s so absurd to me that humans are the only species on earth that charge their own kind for shelter, food, or healing. Imagine a fox charging other foxes rent to be able to sleep inside a cave! That would be ridiculous and would make no sense to them, so why does it make sense to us? Another world is possible, because other possibilities have existed and can exist again—and poetry helps me move toward those possibilities in a more direct and relentless manner.
Jack Giauor (he/him/his) is a queer kinky pisces who lives in an attic in Winthrop, MA. His manuscript hunting the bugs was published by Bateau Press in 2024, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Pieces of Salem anthology, Alien Buddha Zine, and The Sonora Review, among other publications.
