Wendy Weiger

Wendy Weiger on “Death of a Catbird”

In my writing, I explore my relationship with the natural world.  I try to capture the essence of emotional and spiritual experiences I seek in outdoor wanderings. Living in northern Maine, I’m blessed with endless opportunities for hiking, paddling, and snowshoeing. Even when life gets hectic, I carve out time to roam the woods and waters.  In every excursion, I find nourishment for my senses and soul.

However, the most deeply moving experiences can’t be scheduled. If I work at my computer for much of the week, then head into the woods for a couple of days off, I won’t always check “have a profound experience” off my inner to-do list. Meaningful encounters happen at unexpected times, in unlikely places, often when things don’t go as planned.

The events I describe in “Death of a Catbird” unfolded in my yard, over the course of several days when I was involved with ordinary, routine affairs.  Shortly thereafter, I went on a solo backpacking trek into Baxter State Park, a wilderness preserve in the heart of the Maine Woods. For three nights, I was the only human on Wassataquoik Lake, an expanse of cold, clear water surrounded by rugged granite mountains. My mind was free from the constraints of required tasks and the distractions of electronic media. My thoughts kept returning to the dead catbird and its bereaved mate, and the narrative I present here began to take shape.

It may seem ironic that in such a magnificent natural setting – home to more elusive avian species – my thoughts would dwell on humble backyard feeder birds. But the catbirds reminded me that the wild is not limited to remote places far from our everyday lives. Even in towns and cities, the wild is around us, though we often fail to notice it. Our neighbors include creatures who, though they are not human, are fellow beings nonetheless. That understanding makes my world feel richer, more alive.

Writing this piece helped me work through some of my own feelings of bereavement.  In the five years preceding the catbird’s window strike, multiple members of my community died. The losses included my mother, as well as a dearly beloved friend who had been a steadfast support during my mother’s final illness and beyond. I didn’t fully realize the extent to which I was still in mourning. My empathy for the dead catbird’s mate released feelings I had suppressed in my desire to move forward with my life. My lingering grief and loneliness welled up from a dark place deep inside me and flowed into the light, where healing could begin.

I’m grateful for what I learned from my catbird neighbors. I’m sorry it came as the result of death and loss on their part. My hope is that, by sharing my experience, I will pass the gifts I received from them on to others.

Split Rock Press Chapbook Results

Many thanks to all those who submitted manuscripts to the Split Rock Press Chapbook Series. We were very fortunate to receive many fine submissions and selecting a winner was an exceptionally difficult task.

We’re thrilled to announce the winner, finalists, and semi-finalists of the 2020 Split Rock Press chapbook competition.

Winner

Ecology of the Afterlife, poems and illustrations by Nathan Manley

Nathan Manley is a writer and former English teacher from Loveland, Colorado. He is the author of the chapbook Numina Loci (Mighty Rogue Press, 2018). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Think, Natural Bridge, Spillway, Cold Mountain Review, Puerto del Sol, Crab Creek Review and others. His work has also been nominated for Best of the Net. Currently, Nathan resides with his wife and two cats among the great deciduous forests of New England, where he is pursuing a JD at the University of New Hampshire. You can find his writing and instrumental music at nathanmmanley.com.

Finalists

Climate Action Love Poem by Dante Di Stefano

Gasoline on the Ant Hill by Tony Barnstone

Three Parts World by Mureall Hebert

Semi-Finalists

The Vaudeville Horse by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

Visiting Hours by James Wyshynski

Fall Everbearing by David Troupes

Lana Hechtman Ayers

Lana Hechtman Ayers on “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the White Moth at My Window”

Growing up in harrowing circumstances with an abusive parent, books became a very early refuge. In stories, I could escape into adventurous and exciting worlds that offered happy endings. But in poems, I recognized a different kind of sanctuary. The poets whose work I read had faced all kinds of adversity and not only survived it, but thrived to tell about it. Across time and distance, culture and gender, poems reached out to me and inspired hope I could survive my situation as well. So, from the time I could hold a crayon, I began responding to the poems I read with scribbles of my own experiences. It would be a very long time, not until after I completed an MFA at the age of 42, that I would take  my own poetry seriously enough to try submitting it to literary journals. But that early inclination of being in conversation with other poets’ poems has never left me. 

I love the notion of a poem as the beginning of a relationship, a way to express and reveal personal truths. Poems that make me feel, remember, imagine, discover something about myself or the world, or teach me something new, call to me to pen a response of my own. Sometimes, I respond with a poem of my own that in form or content bears very little similarity to the inspiration poem.  Other times, I’ll take a phrase or line from the original poem and use it as epigraph or the first line of my work. In my poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the White Moth at My Window,” inspired by Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” I borrow the structure and form of the original poem entirely. With a poem as rich as Stevens’s, I have had more than one conversation. In addition to the white moth, I have looked at my pen, my little black dog, and a Steller’s Jay in thirteen ways. 

Each time I compose a response poem to another poet’s work, despite being separated by time, distance, gender, culture, religion, or any of the ways people feel distant from one another, I feel part of the community of all poets, connected through our love of language, imagery, and artful expression.

Celia Bland

Celia Bland on “Under the Porch”

My grandmother and I always went to Coin Laundry near 3 Guys Grocery where they passed the savings on to us.  There were wire buggies for wheeling wet to dryers.  There was a sign: Don’t Dye On Us. A bakery next door made antebellum birthday cakes.  A white plastic woman was slotted into a white cake, her breasts and shoulders iced and the cake below this sweet bodice became a hoop skirt, ruffled and beribboned in different colors of spun sugar.  You could blow out the candles.  You could slice your way to her naked legs and tiny high heeled feet.  

This one time, I was fourteen.  I’d slotted quarters into the dryer and I looked around for the dog.  Why did I never have a leash for her?  Not even a length of rope.  She must have slipped through the glass door when someone came in with their baskets while I was flopping wet clothes into the porthole. I searched up past Hardee’s and down near the gas pumps and found her under another dog – stuck, impaled—in the front yard of a brick house. Is that house torn down now?  Did each individual brick explode in humiliation? The man of the house stood on his porch and laughed as I tried pulling my dog from his dog’s swollen member.  

But there was nothing to do but wait. 

Nine weeks later she slipped under our porch to give birth in the dark on dank clay.  I’d laid a faded towel over cardboard under a table in the living room, but bitches hide when whelping or dying.  I thought of that dog years later when I lay naked on a thin rectangle of paper under spotlights magnified by the OR’s glossy tiles.  Masked professionals in dull white gowns moved with purpose and instruments, or stood at the ready, waiting.  I think my poem “Under the Porch” gives some sense of the distance between my desire to retain a modicum of dignity and theirs to see some action between my stirruped legs.  What seems to be the problem?  I should have screamed and bit them, crawled under the table on my hands and knees, and bucked that baby out of me. 

But of course, I did not.