Erika Saunders

Growing up in the Roe v. Wade era afforded me choices I assumed would always be available. The choices available to me as a young woman now seem to be different than what my teenage daughters have before them regarding health, career, and family.

Our family vacationed in Minnesota the week the Dobbs v. Jackson decision was announced. Even with an extended audience of our extended family to discuss the ramifications with, it wasn’t enough to think through and process how this would impact my family, my country.

On that trip when we visited the Minnehaha Falls, my brother-in-law pulled up on his phone “The Song of Hiawatha” by Longfellow and read some lines as we walked. I consider poems to be a vast quilted together conversation and enjoy writing in response to another poem. So, while we visited the falls, I was observant and curious what my experience would yield.

Poems typically begin for me in an experience. I journal details and then let the experience simmer. When I have time to begin drafting a poem, I skim my journal for events or topics and pull nuggets of words and phrases onto the page. Then begins the crafting. Friends have asked before for a checklist of the things I consider at this stage: possible forms, consideration of sentence structure, word choice, literary devices to employ, etc. It is the magic, I suppose, the sense of the poem forming.

Some of my favorite poems I’ve written are those that surprise me. When the language and meaning becomes something entirely different than what I expected when I typed in those first few words and phrases. I once wrote a poem for my husband on his birthday where I intended to celebrate our youthful enjoyment of video gaming, yet the poem shaped into a bleak view of computer zombie-like life in a doomed natural world. (I still gifted it to him.)

Occasionally you write a poem that pulls together seemingly desperate writing experiences that remind you why writing is a perpetual learning practice. Falling water, a staircase, decay. The first choice for this poem was the stanza structure, which I knew would reinforce these ideas by pulling the reader’s eye down as if stepping or falling.

breasts. Falls like a she-bear falls

into a pit trap camouflaged with deadfall

in the forest. Falls as in to commit sin,

Secondly, was to interrogate the definitions of words such as fall, roe, and wade. How are all the ways we can fall based on this court decision? Definitions of roe and wade were an intentional nod to the original ruling, and it was interesting how they fit with the themes.

The goal of this poem was to have each stanza fall into the next one not just by structure but by repetition. We are all falling together repeatedly.

It takes the longest time to work the end of a poem. Typically, I like to turn the poem in the last two to three stanzas and leave the reader with a final punch in the last line. This is tricky. It was important to end questioning the premise that, “abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” Which brought me to consider my grandparents whose experiences bridged the pre and post Roe v. Wade periods. My grandfather once became very animated when our cousin had complications in a fourth pregnancy that were life threatening, and he questioned why she would continue to have children with such known risk. Being raised Catholic, and having a mother who suffered several miscarriages and ended up dying in a mental institution where it sounds like she was placed due to depression, might have made him particularly sensitive to the vulnerabilities of women when they had no reproductive rights.

We’ll just make do.

You might question the choice to give the direct quote in a poem about abortion rights to the husband. Thinking of my grandfather and the men in my life, it was important to bring them into the conversation. Any decision that impacts the health and wellbeing of one family member impacts all. From the stories my grandparents told of growing up in the Depression, the war years, and raising a family; the one consistent theme was that as long as we care for one another, we will find a way to make do.

In a workshop once, I walked the audience through a poem from showing them the first scribbled journal entry to the final published product and explained the thought process and decisions made along the way. At the end one audience member raised their hand and stated they honestly couldn’t see how I got from the start to the finish. I responded that the work to form a polished poem out of chicken scratch is a series of dozens of micro decisions on the part of the writer based on their experience of what works well for them. We have our strengths and as we lean on those our style emerges.

In “Minnehaha Falls the Day After Dobbs” the choice of structure, use of definitions and repetition, and interrogation of the consequences of falling were a few of those dozens of decisions that led to the work coming together.


Barbara Rockman

Barbara Rockman on “Snowstorm with Lament”

Why now? the poem asks. 

It has always delighted and mystified me how a poet makes associations. Unexpected insights arrive in dream or in viewing a piece of art, reading an article or in conversation with a friend—events, narratives and emotions collide and clarify theme and intention. And so it was with this poem.

I had written about the magpie’s remarkable and insistent wailing over the body of its mate. The poem was simply that, chronicle of avian death and a mate’s ritual to revive, mourn, and honor a beloved’s life.

The poem sat in its snug file, frequently revisited and revised since my residency at Playa in the Great Basin in Oregon several years ago. I researched the bird’s habits and grief rituals. I was in awe of the bird’s wisdom and how it might teach us how to grieve. But it was not until grief became a universal language, an epidemic within a pandemic, that something was awakened. As millions died of COVID 19, as country after country lost its humanity and gun violence became the terrifying norm, as we were locked down, unable to hold each other, as we became lonely and unsettled, I turned to the poem to ask it—What do you want now?

I researched. I tweaked.  I tried to imagine an animal’s bodily, wailing fury.

And still the poem felt incomplete.

A year ago, my daughter abandoned a frenetic film production career in Los Angeles to return to her hometown. She moved into her old neighborhood, our neighborhood. She returned to stars and dog walks in arroyos, to family and mountains and quiet. Her two closest childhood friends were here. In December, one of these young women died suddenly of Sepsis. We have known the family for 30 years through Bat Mitzvahs and weddings, divorces and deaths.

It snowed all week. It snowed as we sat shiva. It was unbearable to watch the mother’s tears stream, to say the Kaddish; unbearable to wonder what if it had been my daughter’s fate.

We were glad for the traditional gathering of love and community, its attempt to console and aid us in reckoning with tragedy. But there was no keening, no wailing, no furious beating of earth or breast.   

What we need, I thought, is the magpie’s example.    

Even as I delighted in deep snow, always a gift in our high desert, high-drought landscape; as I stayed in and watched familiar stucco walls and bare oaks and pines become newly defined by ice and white, I remembered Nicole.  And I remembered the magpie.

Collision, association, the poet’s and the seeker’s openness to synchronicity—snowstorm,  nature’s white shroud, death in its stifling and elegant cape, a young woman’s spunk and future stolen—these wanted to enter the poem. And so, a new stanza, a question Why now?

The memorial service and shiva’s relative stillness and containment, lovely in their tradition, sidestepped a need to crack our armor and shriek.  

Might we, animal and human, be more alike than different in our anguish over loss?    

I took time each day to sob— layer upon layer of a hundred griefs that had accumulated over the past half dozen years, and the immediate grief for a red-headed, feisty, kind young woman, now dead. 

I grieved for one black and white wide-winged creature in whose DNA was instruction how to make a grief wreath, how to wail and shriek at life’s loss.

As a poet, I have learned (not always gracefully) to trust synchronicity, to wait for the missing piece offered as much by intuition as craft—that click of mind and heart that offers necessary complexity or depth of feeling, that instant of fresh awareness (Why now?) that must be snatched before it dissolves.  

Poems, I think, have wisdoms to share, mysteries we cannot control. Grief, in all its shapes and visitations, is like this. Out of waking and sleeping, something washes over us— a word, an incident, a connection with the unknown or subconscious. If we are receptive, if our portals are open, nuance and surprise (and sobs and keening) are offered.

And so, from my life-changing month in Oregon’s Great Basin beside a massive dry lake bed, beside a pond of ducks, in a valley edged with burnt mountainsides, and in a county of barn sides loud with Trump for President to the lonely winters of the pandemic in my New Mexico mountains, a poem threaded through me. Maybe we live one long poem. Maybe we insert ourselves occasionally, pop in, awake, and snag a phrase, a metaphor, a thought, and place it into the puzzle we are living and writing.  However it falls onto the page and gives me the opportunity to shape a poem,  

I am always grateful.

Marin Smith

Marin Smith on Writing “Sphincter Law”

 

The experience writing “Sphincter Law” was itself a subsequent lesson in sphincter law.

Sphincter law, originally coined by midwife Ina May Gaskin, broadly refers to the idea that the cervix, though not a sphincter in the technical sense, functions like one during childbirth. It must be open for birth to occur, but for various reasons—like stress and adrenaline spikes—it may remain closed.

Similarly, I didn’t want to write about Nutmeg, the pregnant mare who died my first summer on the ranch. But when I started writing, there she was waiting for me, silent in her foggy field. Then she brought a friend along: the equally tragic horse named Buster, who I watched endure a particularly torturous cowboy training session.

For a whole year of working on this essay, I resisted the stories of these two horses. The trouble was, without them, I couldn’t figure out what the essay was trying to say.

So I did what I had to: I trashed the entire thing and started anew, this time inviting the horses in—and wouldn’t you know it? Things started to open up.

The opening scene of “Sphincter Law” sets up the idea that motherhood is like fixing a barbed-wire fence for the first time in your life—you have some tools, some idea of how a fence should work and what it should do, and some model fences around to look at, but you don’t actually have any idea what you’re doing.

There was nothing that could fully prepare me for the dismembering that was motherhood—in my case (and that of many other women) in both the literal and metaphorical sense. In writing this piece, the two horses—specifically the states of their bodies—became connected to my physical experience of birth, and, in a broader sense, to aspects of my experience with the creative act in general.

Writing, too, doesn’t work when you’re squeezing too tight. It’s only when we learn to open—or are cut open—that it can be born.

Patricia Rockwood

Unlike most of my poetry, which usually starts with an image or feeling and unfolds from there, this poem, “Abecedarian: To the Possum Who Visited Me One Night,” clearly needed to tell a story. The abecedarian – also called abecedary – offers an interesting way to advance a narrative, with the strict alphabetical progression of initial starting letters within 26 lines. I’ve always been fascinated by poetic forms and enjoy experimenting with them. I think it’s partly because I love puzzles, and poetic forms feel a bit like puzzles to me: I find myself asking, Can I express this feeling or image or idea in the form of a villanelle, sestina, or sonnet, for instance, without it sounding contrived? If it doesn’t work, then I might try something else, or go back to simple free verse. Usually, the context suggests the form, and I take off from there. With my students, I often suggest that they try writing a poem using an unfamiliar form as a way to break out of a rut, or to expand their means of expression – or simply to have a little fun. 

Every story has a setting, and mine is Sarasota, Florida, where I live on a postage stamp-sized suburban parcel that I keep as wild as I dare. I have no grass, just mulch paths, perennial plants, shrubs, vines, and small trees that I try to trim now and then (mostly “then”). When I bought the house, twenty-five years ago this fall, the only vegetation on the property was a couple of magnificent oaks and a scraggly orange tree (since departed). I was younger and a lot stronger then and hauled dirt and manure around like a farmhand. I planted gardens and laid out paths. I planted mostly perennials, which was a wiser move than I knew at the time, because now, when I can’t move around like I used to, my yard is a visual representation of Darwin’s law of survival of the fittest: The strongest plants have thrived, they pretty much take care of themselves, and all I have to do is trim them back once in a while, when I can. I am in Zone 10, and my semitropical plants grow like, well, weeds.

Some parts of the yard I have left largely untouched – that is to say, as beautifully chaotic as nature wants to be. My side yard, for example, is now a largely impassable riot of flowering vines and shrubs – but the blossoms attract butterflies and hummingbirds, so I can’t bear to cut things back very much. The undergrowth provides habitat and hiding places for all manner of fauna as well, from insects and lizards to larger critters. When I’m sitting on my lanai at dusk, a raccoon or possum – preceded by discreet rustlings in the undergrowth – might pass by on its way to the water sources in the backyard: the raccoon to the birdbath, the possum to the ground-level water dish. It makes me happy that they can find shelter of sorts near my home. The suburbs, after all, are not their natural habitat, and they must survive as best they can. It’s a hard life. I have to stop myself from feeding them, though if they dig up the kitchen scraps I bury in the back garden, no one will know, and besides, everybody’s got to eat, right?

Like most children, I felt a kinship with small animals and always secretly wished they would make friends with me; come to my hand; allow me to pet them like my dog and cat. I must admit I’ve never really outgrown that wistful desire. But, also like most children, I grew up and learned that there was an invisible barrier between our world and theirs. I would never learn to speak their language, and they would never speak mine (Alex the Parrot notwithstanding). Our Venn diagram always had and always would have an extremely thin overlap. Perhaps the reason wild creatures so enchant us – while at the same time causing an undercurrent of free-floating anxiety – has to do in part with this mysterious remove; that no matter how much time we spend in their company, we can never really know them.

And yet, we can never stop loving them. The natural world fills up my pages, as it does so many other poets. Writers are often advised to “Write what you know.” I would add, “Write what you love.”

The little possum that I wrote about could have mistaken the small hole in my lanai screen for the hole in the shrubbery that led to his burrow. Or maybe he was just following his nose, as I suggest in the poem. Or perhaps he just went exploring, like kids do, and got into trouble. Whatever the happenstance, I was glad to play host for a little while. And though he would never know it, I was especially glad to confer a bit of immortality on him by making him the star of my poem. 

A few years after the incident I wrote about, I opened my back door one morning and found an adult possum, dead, lying next to the screen. Digging a grave to return him to the earth, feeling a tiny bit weepy, I had to wonder whether he was the same one that had visited me that night.