One of my oldest friends, who’s not a writer, recently said to me, “I think you need to move on in your work.” Move on, she means, from writing about pregnancies, babies born premature, NICU stays — poems reverberating with the despair of a new mother who doesn’t know how to cope with fear and possible loss. It’s been almost six years since my daughter was born weeks early and 18 months since my son was born more than two months premature. They’re both happy and healthy kids, and the fear I carried for a long time has finally left my body and mind.
My chapbook manuscript, Absence of Stars, was full of these mother-and-baby poems, which I finally took a hard look at — I finally decided to chop into the work, taking out some of the poems I had held onto too long, and infused other poems with more happiness and hope. While looking for a home for this manuscript, I’m starting work on a new project, one that’s inspired in part by Traci Brimhall’s poetry that deals with spirituality, Catholicism and forms of divination.
It was hard to let go of some of the poems I’ve lived with for a couple of years, and that have carried me. But it’s important in our work to take a step back to do that self-editing. Writing for self-healing is a wonderful thing, but if your aim is to also publish it, you need to edit the work to appeal to a wider audience by maybe making it less personal or using images that more readers can internalize and feel. I encourage you to do the same in your work. Ask friends and other writers to read your work and offer their honest assessment if you’re too close to it or whether it’s ripe to send out.
Here is one of my mother/baby poems that I’ll close with:
Still Life
Luscious lemon – dishabille, your rind curling off,
your canary-yellow skin stippled with earthy browns, faint olives –
I stand, enraptured. How can a lemon, already peeled,
ripening into acidy green, be so radiant, so joyously bathed
in light, and the half-shadow crossing it, the color of brandy
and ripe leaves, nearly breaking my heart? I’m entering
this still life – the way she entered me – I can enter
because its perfection has been marred: The bread
is sliced into, there’s a half-filled roemer, and even the pinked
and ultramarine asparagus is starting to turn. These things
are made more beautiful by use. I witnessed my body
unexpectedly falling in love with her, pelvic bones stretching apart,
her lemon-sized body floating in my distended belly,
black line arcing over what had been taut and tight. You
can imagine how this feels, some tears, some laughter,
watching your body this way: becoming weighted.
This Old Master has invited me into his still life and we
become intimate in this delicious space. Like the lemon,
a flirty nude starting to unfurl into decay, I see my body
for what it is: perishable and lovely, a temporary place
useful to her. She’ll find her way out into the real light,
unfurling me back – skin discarded.
***
Nicole Rollender is media director for Minerva Rising.
