Author: admin

This poem had been building for quite some time.

I’ve been volunteering with the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center since 2007; I’m a community education volunteer and a survivor speaker. In the former role, I’ve been doing a lot of work within my local community and the greater SF/F community regarding sexual violence. It’s been pretty nonstop. And by the nature of it, it worked its way into every aspect of my life – especially as I began to write a novel about childhood sexual abuse. And spent some time actually working at BARCC as well.

I began to fray. Vicarious trauma, they call it. It’s not uncommon. I kept pushing myself, but I got to a point where I had to take leave or snap, and I did take leave.

And the week I took leave, I wrote this poem.

Which has new meaning now that I’ve realized that I was in an abusive relationship at the time – a relationship that exploded into violence the week the poem was published.

“And the War is Never Over” was published in Strange Horizons in May 2013.

(Art by Paula Friedlander!)

I am tired of Persephone Poems.

We all have them! I have two. It’s an attractive narrative – the lovely, innocent young maiden seduced into the underworld. People have done interesting things with the story. But it’s one of the most popular narratives out there, poetry-wise, and I am drowning in Persephone and want to drown her.

So yes, everyone loves the good girl.

What about the bad girl? What about someone who’s a Queen of the Underworld in her own right, and could be an equal match for Hades?

I’m a Sumerian mythology geek, and I’ve told my version of Inanna’s Descent. What about Inanna’s sister, who requires that Inanna surrender her very life?

That’s a strong character.

So here, Ereshkigal has a proposition for Hades.

And I still can’t read the last line aloud without blushing.

“Ereshkigal’s Proposal to Hades” was published in Mythic Delirium #27.

(Art by Paula Friedlander!)

It’s funny how many of the pieces I sell to Mike Allen of Mythic Delirium originate with him, in one way or another. This one is quite directly traceable to him!

Every year at Readercon, Mike runs a speculative poetry workshop. One year, Readercon had other poets listed as participants – Mike was still in charge, but people doing the workshop could come to the poet-assistants and ask us for input and guidance. I’m not sure how well that worked! (One person did approach me, but he seemed more interested in my cleavage than my critique.)

What was productive, though, was that Mike made us write! We had an enforced period of time where we were just to write whatever came to us. Just stretch. It took me a while to pull my brain into writing mode; I kept sneaking peeks at Erik Amundsen’s notebook (he is incredible). Finally I settled down and wrote three short pieces – a haiku, just to put my brain in “we are paying attention to words now” mode. The beginnings of a poem about how we relate to fairy tales. And, since my brain drifts inexorably to fairy tales, oracles, and Vegas when left unattended, this poem about an oracle in a nightclub.

Drinking’s a bad idea, when one has a tendency to spill prophecy. Dancing might be even worse.

“The Oracle Never Dances” was published in Mythic Delirium #27.

“nameless” is actually the first thing I wrote in the world of what’s now my novel-in-progress, Cicatrix. I had an image of a dancing woman with twisted scars on her shoulderblades, what might have been wings…

The poem didn’t quite work. It sat on my hard drive for a while as I did other things, including expanding that glimpse into a novel – now the person who used to have wings is male, and he has an interesting way of covering those scars. But, as always in a novel, there’s room for other stories than the ones I’m currently telling. Somewhere out there there’s room for the narrator of this poem.

And somewhere there was the right poem for her! I revisited the poem recently, trying to cut it down to ten lines; it didn’t work. Then I opened it up just a little more, let it breathe – and here we go.

An interesting autobiographical note: my birth mother never named me. I was simply “the baby” until she gave me up for adoption. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I went through name after name, and nothing stuck; when I later learned that I hadn’t been given a name, I attributed my name-fluidity to that.

In the world of Cicatrix, why might a child not be named, or be un-named? What effects might namelessness have?

“nameless” was published in Through the Gate #1 in September 2012.

When I was little, my grandmother made the most amazing mushroom barley soup.

She made it from scratch, and that alone was so different from dinner with my parents, who don’t cook. (My father grills. But usually dinner at their place is takeout.) Just the flash of her knife on the cutting board was something out of another world for me, something to be observed and marveled at. My grandmother’s world was so different from mine, so foreign – and the story that we were told as children of the ’70s and early ’80s was that progress was all, progress was what one strived for. Never look back. Spaghetti and meatballs in a takeout tin was superior to homemade soup; it saved time and mess.

But I loved that soup! I loved the heavy spoon in the green Depression glass bowl. I loved the dense flavors. I loved that my grandmother loved making it. It was my grandfather’s favorite dish, you see; she made it for him.

And he died, and she never made it again.

I asked a few times, but she demurred, and I realized that it was her soup for him; that she couldn’t. I don’t know if she knew how much I loved it; I was ten, and I don’t know if I ever really communicated it to her. She died when I was 14, after a protracted and terrible illness.

It’s not just the recipe I lost. It’s not even just my quietly funny and sweet grandmother. It’s my connection to a past that I value more every year, the sense of history, of where we came from. In my early life, the culture around me was telling me to sever that connection and boldly go into a homogenous future. That is not what I want. I want my grandmother’s soup, and the glass bowls she kept all her life, and the slow chopping of mushrooms, and the murmurs of a dying language. I want my roots.

I cook from scratch. I’ve discovered that I have celiac disease; one of the first things I realized upon my diagnosis is “I can never have that soup again.” But I’ll be experimenting with quinoa or millet in place of the barley. And it may never be my grandmother’s soup, but it’s okay if it’s mine. And I will teach the recipe to my daughter and, when she has them, to her children, and I will tell them about their silly-sweet great-great-grandma Essie.

“Mushroom Barley Soup: An Invocation” was published in Stone Telling #8, August 2012.