Rachel Trousdale

Rachel Trousdale on “Collection” and “Self Portrait as Noble Pen Shell”

“Collection” and “Self Portrait as Noble Pen Shell” are pandemic poems. That fact is probably either obvious or opaque, depending on who, where, and when the reader is. There is nothing in either poem about disease. But I think they have something to say about isolation, especially when taken together. My son’s collection of interesting rocks, lovingly amassed over a series of walks up the hill behind our house during the spring and summer of 2020, persistently brought the outside (with its dirt, clinging grubs, irregular shapes, and irreducible solidity) into the hard shell of our home. These are pandemic poems in the sense that they are about the attraction and the danger of leaving apparent safety inside for the unpredictable beauties and perils out of doors.

They are also pandemic poems because during that long first year, my family—husband, five-year-old son, two-year-old daughter, and I—spent more time, and more sustained observation, in the natural world than we had ever managed before. The complex relationships between the human and the nonhuman (humans and viruses; humans and mountains; humans and the alarmingly unstable seasons; and on the smaller scale, our family and our backyard garden) shifted from background consciousness to our primary shared interest and preoccupation.

Humans’ interdependence with the natural world became a daily source of fear and joy for us, in a way that felt new to me even after decades spent reciting Shelley and Frost on long hikes. As I wrote these two poems, I wanted to catch complementary aspects of the increasing continuity I felt between my family and the landscape we live in, recognizing the hard shells we have built around our bodies and the ways those shells are, and ought to be, permeable and temporary.

Ronda Broatch

When Our Stories Meander, the Eagle Comes: Musings on Birds, Bears, Cosmology and Quantum Physics, and How to Love the Earth

By Ronda Broatch

Often, when I write a poem, it finds its beginning from an exercise. 

A week after the pandemic-shut-down of 2020, two dear friends and I began to meet weekly, on Thursday evenings, to write. We had no place to go, which meant we suddenly found ourselves with lots of time to write—such luxury! We’d all been working outside the home, and the shut-down was only going to last a couple of weeks, so why not grab the opportunity to write together via Zoom (new technology to me!) for two hours.

We each created a writing prompt to share, often with a surrealist bent, often using words mined from existing poems, sometimes adding link to noteworthy science of the day, or some dispatch from the natural, earth-bound world. The possibilities were endless. And so, as two weeks lengthened in a month, then longer, our Thursday Night Poetry Writing three-some carried on faithfully for over a year. We wrote three poems each time we met and created three new poetry prompts each week to share. If nothing else, what a treasure of writing prompts! If nothing else, we’d amassed one-hundred-fifty poem starts each—and often fully useable, and shortly thereafter published, poems—in the span of that first COVID year. My poem here comes from one of those weekly meetings.

Walking the beaches near our home, I often hear the eagles high up in the trees, or wheeling out over the water, looking for fish to feed their young. There was the red-tailed hawk I connected briefly with on a walk on the many trails near home, the bear who on several occasions raided the apple trees and blackberry patches on our acreage, leaving hints of their visit behind to fertilize the ground—all become fertile additions to a poem.

Often questions and directions in the prompt bring up things I might have forgotten to write about, and often a word from a list or word block stirs some memory or dream and brings it to the page. Our writings are timed—usually eighteen minutes—which gets us ‘out of our heads’ so as to address as much of the prompt as possible before the timer goes off. ‘Cipher’ was undoubtedly in the list. In it went.

At the same time, I’d been reading a lot of physicist Brian Greene’s books, in particular The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, among other writings about cosmology and quantum physics, which have generated several poems. (Many of these poems are in my forthcoming book, Chaos Theory for Beginners (MoonPath Press, 2023.) At the writing of this particular poem, I was grappling with my understanding of spacetime, and the concept of ‘quantum jittering’. (I’ll let you look that up. The possible rabbit holes are almost as plentiful as there are galaxies.) Add to the mix some local science re. methane plumes, and the poem reaches not only into the sky but deep into the earth, to movements that aren’t regularly visible. From earthworms to black holes, my thinking while writing often allows me to meander into realms seen, and hidden, and theorized.

Everything everywhere all at once, to make mention of the 2022 movie of the same name. That’s a little how I see this poem. And a lot about how I write.

Freesia McKee

Freesia McKee on “Like Buying a House”

Since I began moving through the world as a young feminist writer, my most important work has involved the act of questioning. I want to shake the foundations, trespass, jump the fence, slide through the smallest casement window and investigate the corners of the basement. I want to see what’s underground. Many of us write against borders, across property lines, violating the gated zoning the sticklers taught us was a given. We write well in places of tension, possibility, and conflict. Our most exciting writing often happens at a precipice.

One of the elemental homes of my poetic imagination is my paternal grandparents’ house, a creaking, antique, four-bedroom Waukesha County farmhouse with a suburb that grew in around it. They lived there for fifty years, and I also lived in the house with my dad on weekends in middle and high school while he cared for his octogenarian father. What I remember best are the layers of stuff that family members had accumulated. It fascinated me: scrapbooks from the 1930s, green fabric from World War II, dusty cigar boxes and old baseballs and antique glass jugs. I spent weekends alone or with my little sister crawling through every room, snooping.

After my grandfather’s death about fifteen years ago, the house was purchased by its municipality and demolished to create a retention pond so the high school parking lot next door would stop flooding. The pond is actually a beautiful marsh with cattails and mallard ducks, sort of a public space we can still visit. The house and its sensory delights still appear often in my dreams, so I suppose I visit that part of my childhood, too. However, the critical consciousness of my adulthood has given me a more complex lens through which to view this essential destination of my personal landscape: the post-WWII homeownership and social stability that led to this house being “in the family” for over fifty years is due to class privilege and white supremacy.

In 2020, my partner Jade and I moved to a small Midwestern town in a neighboring state after she began a tenure-track job at its university. We’d dealt with nasty landlords for the previous several years, but now, we were in a position to buy a house. We’d been able to save money in the last Midwestern town we’d lived, a place with a disturbing social climate but the tradeoff of a very low cost of living.

As two queer Millennial women and itinerant artist-academics without children, we were both different and the same as my paternal grandparents, a homemaker (artist) and salesman (inventor) who raised five children in the 1950s and ‘60s. All four of us white, all four of us in financial positions during our thirties—albeit with seven decades between us—to purchase property with money we both did and did not earn.

“Like Buying a House” maps my thought process as Jade and I began to think about buying a home. Many of the offerings of comfort our society hands us are actually complacency in pretty packaging. This has become increasingly true for me during this first half of my thirties. Every year, my social location offers me more comfort. Every year, these same hands push me towards complacency. Buying a house in this small town seemed possible, even in some ways easy, but what did shaking hands with our unearned social advantage cost us? Every business deal that offers stability seems to have a sinister side.

Was it ethical for us to “own” property? Can you own a house and keep a pretty stable job and maintain a radical politics? In this piece, I’ve tried to write on that edge of my thinking, that border of questioning. And I’ve tried to write also at the border of prose and poetry, the page itself a landscape I want to uncut and de-pipeline, these linguistic bureaucracies and highways I want to re-evaluate as the crow flies.

Pamela Wax

Pamela Wax on “Still Radioactive in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone”

The genesis of this poem speaks to the role of associative thinking, happenstance, and research in my writing. Right after receiving my friend’s positive medical news, I bumped into another friend on the street. I relayed my excitement and said, “It’s like a miracle.” She responded, “It is a miracle.” Immediately, I said to her, “I’m going to write a poem about that.” I knew that a poem just about that medical miracle, however, was surefire Hallmark. I needed nuance. I needed science. That’s where my fascination with nature’s resiliency in unlikely environmental disaster zones came in.

And that’s where my delight that the world rallied around Ukraine against Russia came in, making a connection to Chernobyl, in particular. The poem ultimately became a layering of those three different miracles—medical, environmental, geopolitical/humanitarian—with the addition of the daily cosmic miracle of sunlight.

While my first book of poetry, Walking the Labyrinth (Main Street Rag, 2022), has a couple of poems about environmental issues, it is primarily a book about my moving through grief following my brother’s death by suicide. My forthcoming chapbook, Starter Mothers (Finishing Line Press), has a few environmental poems in it, as well. However, the collection I’m working on now will have climate grief front and center, and this poem will be there!