Mollie O'Leary

Mollie O'Leary

I wrote the first draft of “On Empathy” on the day Roe and Casey were overturned. I revised and then submitted the final draft three days later. Usually, my initial drafts don’t succeed in uncovering an essential layer in the poem that later drafts are able to excavate. This poem was different. There was an obvious urgency behind it that made it develop more quickly.

I realize the title “On Empathy” might be polarizing because empathy is a loaded term. It is great in theory but often poorly executed in practice. The idea of being an ‘empath’ is sort of a running joke now because claiming to be an empathetic person has become a way for people to center themselves instead of the experiences of others–which is, of course, empathy’s actual goal.

While writing this poem, I thought of the times I’ve fumbled in expressing empathy and the times I’ve been on the receiving end of this experience. In claiming to know how someone feels when extending empathy, I sometimes run the risk of making the exchange about myself and flattening the complexity of that person’s pain. There is a difference between relating to someone and inadvertently eclipsing their struggle with my own.

This is where the idea of imagination became important for me. When I say, I can imagine your pain, I’m acknowledging that there is a gap between our experiences which I can’t close in order to truly know how you feel, but I am still trying to bridge it in solidarity with you. Taking time to pause and imagine experiences outside of our own is an exercise in empathy.

In this sense, empathy is inextricable from imagination. I want people to not just consider the rhetoric around abortion, but to imagine the embodied experience of it—the reality of forcing someone to be pregnant.

I know this poem alone can’t reverse the decision, but writing it still felt important. It is a record of a moment in history and a refusal to let it go unscrutinized. In Casey, the court ruled that there was a realm of personal liberty which the government could not enter. Today, this is no longer true. This retraction and its consequences, in my mind, betray a fundamental and willful lack of empathy. At its best, I want this poem to point us toward another way of being—a lighter, less burdened way of being.

KELLY GRAY

Writing Lightly: The Metabolic Rate of a Story

by Kelly Gray

Recently, I watched a short film about the making of a mushroom documentary, and the equally brilliant and trippy filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg said something that has stayed with me, “. . . a mosquito on your arm, which has a little drop of blood, looks at the hand that’s coming toward it in slow motion and has plenty of time to fly away because its metabolic rate, its life span, is much shorter than ours. And our lifespan is much shorter than that of a redwood. Our reality is not the only point of view, and that’s exactly the beauty of cameras and time-lapse cinematography. It’s basically a time machine.”

I started to think about relationships as having their own metabolic rate. Stories too might have their own metabolic rate. Some might start fast and end fast, like a seeing a comet in the sky out of the corner of your eye, and others may seem to predate and extend past the time we physically get to spend with the other person or narrative, like a memory of a mountain that we know we can return to. I wanted to use short form writing to hold something as large as time, and to use language and imagery in quick bursts to explore a relationship that expands into the past and future. The use of the fox and paintings within the story act as invitations for the reader to step into this way of thinking. 

When I began writing “A Picture of a Fox,” it was a love letter. It was also a story about the ways we try to capture time. Probably like most folks, much of my personal suffering is centered around time; will I have enough, how will I spend it, what time have I lost, and how to make peace without knowing these answers. When my partner is painting, he is paying attention to and observing that which is fleeting, which we have in common. I did not want this piece to heavy, but light, foxlike.

I often work towards my reader experiencing sense of place and the relationships we have with the non-human world without directly being told the entire story. As a writer, you have access to so much, and you are often obligated to keep most of it in your back pocket. We live in the forest. All windows face trees and within the trees are passages and tracks and trails left by the seasons, animals, decay, and rebirth. The soil is very present, even when you can’t see it because of the redwood duff, because everything in death falls to the forest floor and is then reborn again, pushed back up. The fox is only one expression of the forest, and when you live with foxes, you hear and see their cycles. This morning, I heard the mama fox wailing, as her kits have finally left their den, and she is bereft, calling them back to her. They will not come back. You cannot hear her cries without knowing her pain, which is like all of our pain, held by the tightening container of time. Yet, she is part of a lineage of foxes. When she and her partner die, another pair will move into their territory. They will use the same paths and eat from the same family of robins. In our lifetime, we will see this happen every few years, because the foxes have much shorter life spans than we do. Our home sits inside a tight ring of redwood trees, and these trees, the second generation from the original redwoods that were slaughtered to build the city to the south of us by colonizers, have seen four families raise their children, live their lives, make their art beneath their boughs. These trees will outlast my daughter’s children’s children, unless climate change burns them out. And even then, their roots will persist and grow saplings from the ashes. My back pockets are full.

I did not want to weigh down the story with numbers, too much natural history, and exact questions, even though I was shuffling through them as I wrote. Around 3.6 million years ago, grey foxes became their own distinct candid species. Now, they climb trees and hide bones in them to mark their territory. They are the only candid species with retractable claws, which is due to evolution. Evolution is simply collective bodies changing through deep time. Redwood Trees are clocked at being 240 million years old. When you type into Google “redwoods older than,” one of the first things that comes up is, “Are redwoods older than Jesus?” People also want to know if sequoias are older than flowers and spiders. Humans have so many questions.

This year I am 45, my partner is 46. I want to know how much time we will have together, and sometimes this not knowing makes me weep in frustration. We met during lockdown. Our sense of time together has always had a bending, tilting quality. Sometimes we joke that we are older than dirt. Even when I am weeping, I find great comfort in this, knowing that dirt is constantly being born, as are my stories, his paintings, and the fox babies up the hill. We try to walk lightly, to live deeply.

EMRY TRANTHAM

EMRY TRANTHAM ON “THREE RACCOONS”

Three baby raccoons.

They were in my backyard, they were unafraid, and they were orphaned. We ascertained that much by the second day. They were also impossibly precious – tiny woodland things with curious eyes and a toddling gait. I looked for them when I woke up in the morning, when I returned home in the evening, and again before bed. I went out and photographed them, their whiskers beautifully crisp against the bokeh of late summer leaves. They delighted me.

What I wanted to do: keep them forever. Put them in a box with a warm towel, give them scraps and treats, bottles if they’d take them.  Love them until they loved me back. They would have, eventually. They followed me around the yard as it was. But I had three dogs, three children, and a small house, not to mention the anxious temperament of a lifelong rule follower. There could be no successful taming of raccoons, no matter how I longed to mother them.

There was no one else for the job, either. There are few wildlife rehabilitators period, even fewer licensed to handle raccoons (often rabies vectors), and not one I could find. A local woman who had cared for many a squirrel and possum offered her backyard to them – if we could catch them, we could release them on her property. 

Would that have been the right choice? Maybe. At the time, I couldn’t imagine trapping them and moving them to a place they didn’t know. Our backyard was at least familiar to them. They slept in a hole beneath a rotting stump, curled up like commas. We had abundant acorns, light traffic and a few neighbors’ trash cans to pillage. And there was always the hope, however dim, that their mother would come back for them. What if she came back, finally, and they were gone? Their mother’s presence was their best chance for survival.

And yet: If I’d taken them to the rehabilitator’s backyard, my hound dog wouldn’t have leapt the fence and injured the smallest one. My daughters and I wouldn’t have had to watch in horror as she shook the squealing kit. I wouldn’t have had to place it in a box and watch it breathe, staring at me, for the next hour before I handed it over to the officer who would kill it humanely.

If the first one hadn’t died, would the others have?  It’s likely they were too young to survive without a mother, regardless of their numbers. All I know for certain is that they left us, one by one, and I felt a little more responsible for each death. I could have done something. I should have done something.

I wrote “Three Raccoons” a month or so after the raccoons came and went. They left me heavy; guilt, shame, sadness – it was all tangled together in my throat every time I thought of them. When my throat is too constricted to speak, of course, I write poems. The feelings become untangled and visible, so that I might inspect them from a distance.

I sat with the poem for a long time. My question was still: What should we have done with three orphaned racoons? I didn’t feel as if the poem had answered the question.

This summer, our youngest dog caught a baby possum. My husband pulled the fuzzy baby from the lab’s mouth and handed it to me. This time, the answer was simple. I took it inside, dried it off, warmed it up, and gave it food. I let it rest for a few days, then released it.

During the process of caring for the possum, I began to research wildlife rehabilitation. Maybe I could become a person to take in the animals and care for them without feeling as if I were doing the animals a disservice. During my research, I came across the lines that would become the epigraph of my poem. Most species of wildlife have evolved ways of compensating for very high annual mortality. Interference by humans to save any one individual will do little for the population one way or the other. In other words: Let nature take its course. An orphaned racoon is nothing, and nothing multiplied by three? Still nothing.

The opening of the poem was the last piece I needed. Finding the epigraph marked its completion – not a defense, exactly, because it didn’t absolve me of my choices. But it succinctly made the argument I was trying to interrogate in my poem. It was one simple answer for the question my poem asks, and I hope that in my poem it is clear that though it is an answer, I still don’t know if it is the right one.

And that’s okay. Sometimes there is no right answer. There is only the one I already chose. 

Martha Silano

Martha Silano: Notes on Drafting and Revising “Once,”

As I prepared to write this essay, I considered how I would click on my voluminous Unfinished folder and find at least a dozen versions. However, when I searched, I found only three drafts.

Some of my poems take years to write, but this one came relatively quickly, or so it appeared. I wasn’t sure, though – maybe I had written a long-hand draft in a diary I’d tossed into a box with the dozens of others from the past year or two. After some searching, I found a few notes I’d jotted down on April 24, 2022:

From a swirl of gases, hydrogen and helium, mostly – from an exploded supernova –

sulfur

neon

nitrogen

carbon

iron

I need a container for this info – a sonnet???

That a supernova had to explode.

That a star had to coalesce. A fusion reaction.

The bulge in the middle became the sun.

One of the planets was Earth.

And then, just before I presumably switched to my laptop to write the first draft:

(I don’t know how to tell this story in an interesting/fresh/new way. The facts of it are just incredible. Don’t need much doctoring up.)

I remember the place and time. I was in my backyard in my favorite beach chair, sitting under a cherry tree. I had gone out there to commune with the robins and crows, but also with the hope I might write a first draft of a poem about a book I’d read aloud to my partner during the early part of lockdown. I’d checked it out from the library, but since libraries were closed, I didn’t have to return it until June. We finished the book, and I returned it.

My partner and I love to reminisce about how this book helped keep things in perspective as the pandemic raged on, as humans began to die in droves, as we worried when a random passerby stopped to pet our outdoor cat, then snuggled up with us in bed. Was Nacho a vector?

It helped us fall sleep.

Fast forward two years. I was still thinking about The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, by Robert M. Hazen. Why didn’t I own a copy? A few days later, I did. Soon after, I’d decided to write a poem about the origin of our planet.

Under the cherry tree, I re-read the first two chapters. It was harder reading then I’d recalled, even more incomprehensible. No matter how many times I read about the Big Bang origin story, my head can’t quite wrap itself around the tiny speck that inflated into a cosmos 93 billion light years in diameter.

How do I explain what happened after I dropped my pen and turned to my computer screen? The first draft is not too different from the one I submitted to Split Rock Review. I put the poem aside, and then I returned to sharpen a few images. I brought it to my poetry critique group, and they suggested I play with the ending (I did).

As I re-read this poem today and try to remember how I wrote it, I pretty much can’t, though I do recall having fun with choosing some of the things we have on Earth – mouthwash and lemons, pavement and flukes. I also recall looking up the word stook. Who knew that a hay bale was a stook? I liked the sound of it.

So, yeah, I was in a trance. My friends that day were intuition and the most important thing a teacher ever told me: listen. I pushed hard against my doubts. Then, I was hypnotized. Where the poem wanted me to go, I went.