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!

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.