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.

Monica Mankin

Monica Mankin on “Hurricane’s Wake” and “Moon in Which Nothing Happens”

A few factors have turned my poetic practice toward deepening my relationship with the non-human and to scrutinizing human responses to and treatment of our environment(s).

First, living in Louisiana, I have, since Hurricane Katrina, experienced the catastrophic hurricane damage that residents of the Gulf Coast have had to face more frequently in recent years. This, coupled with the heightened sense of disaster and states of fear created by the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, has encouraged me to explore the precariousness of being alive.

Second, reading Donna J. Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene a while back, the following words stayed with me:

To think-with is to stay with the natural cultural multispecies trouble on earth. There are no guarantees, no arrow of time, no Law of History or Science or Nature in such struggles. There is only the relentlessly contingent SF[1] worlding of living and dying, of becoming-with and unbecoming-with, of sympoeisis, and so, just possibly of multispecies flourishing on earth.

To contextualize and translate, humans need to stop thinking we are exceptional, with our hero story—or “the prick tale of Humans in History” as Haraway puts it—which validates our murderous and exploitative cultures. We need to get with the other species on this planet to resolve the troubles we’ve created throughout the Anthropocene. Haraway insists that we must change this story of life. So, one might ask how much can poems really do here? My practice is driven by my belief that poems can do a lot, even if they seemingly do nothing. They enter our minds through ears or eyes, and without our immediate awareness of what’s happening they work on our thinking, and this has the powerful potential to “change the story,” as Haraway urgently calls for us to do. So, these two poems are part of a larger collection in which I am working to answer that call.

Third, Lucy, my dog, and I have been together since she was born four years ago. I haven’t lived with any animals since I was a child, and then I was not in charge of keeping them alive. Her presence creates in me a different sense of my own presence in the world. Simply put, I may react one way to a situation and she reacts another, and this sometimes generates a poem’s situation or structure, as it did for both “Hurricane’s Wake” and “Moon in Which Nothing Happens.”

A while after Hurricane Ida, our block was full of construction workers and the disruptive sounds of rebuilding. There is an undefined period of uncertainty and unrest after a hurricane blows through, when debris clogs the arteries of the city-machine, and the bang and buzz and clang of rebuilding echoes through the streets, and every-one-thing is menacing. It’s tempting to leave such a place, whether temporarily or permanently, but there’s really nowhere else to go, and somehow I found a strange peace in the quiet, cyclical, non-human “dismantling” of the monarch butterfly that was devoured by ants on my front porch. In this peace, even against Lucy’s restlessness, I felt a strong need to stay put, to protect.

“Moon in Which Nothing Happens” addresses the case of the mysterious peanut shells that appeared in our backyard during the pandemic lockdown. I imagined “a trespasser skulking [the] open yard,” But Lucy was just like, All right! Peanuts! Such contrast got me thinking about the human preoccupation with trespasser violation, as evidenced by the many motion-sensitive floodlights that both my immediate neighbors installed. This is not to say animals do not defend territories or fret over becoming prey, but humans, and I think particularly Americans, are preoccupied with this in an unbalanced way, for reasons beyond mere survival instinct. We have become scared of ourselves as we have become scared of the dark, and we think if we light up the night we will be safe. Of course, this just isn’t true. “Moon in Which Nothing Happens” weaves all of these thoughts together in the hope that perhaps we can set aside fear to rediscover the abundance of all that still lives in the dark.

[1] Haraway explains in her introduction that SF is “an ubiquitous figure” throughout her book that represents: “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far.”