Two Poems by Kelly O'Rourke

Menstrua Shun: [shun = (.)]

unlucky monthly / femin / posi / (.) /

uter / (impure) / ine / untouch / avoid men /

communal bathing / banned from the kitch / (.) /

swift ex- tradi / (.) / ex-communica / (.) /

in muddy blood huts / in lonely stone sheds /

in rocky closets / birth isola / (.) /

doors blocked from predators /

tiger / snake poison /

neighbors’ intru / (.) /

despite the hiding / curse apprehension /

cold / fire burning / (asphyxia / (.))

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Baby Doe (State of Tennessee)

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Author’s Note: Menstrua Shun: [shun = (.)] was inspired by news articles regarding the practice of chhaupadi: pronounced (CHOW-pa-dee), from Nepali words that mean “someone who bears an impurity.” There are few locations where isolation of the women away from the home is still practiced, and it is now actually illegal. I wanted to incorporate the sonic endings “-tion” or “-sion” of the words with the meaning of “being shunned,” and also the grammatical symbol of the period to represent this.
Source that inspired this piece: “Where a Taboo Is Leading to the Deaths of Young Girls”

After reading the collection Whereas, by Layli Long Soldier, I used as source material for Baby Doe (State of Tennessee) a legal document shared on social media from the State of Tennessee’s proceedings against Purdue Pharma and others. I decided to crop excerpts and create erasure poems echoing themes observed in Whereas of how larger entities and structures impact individual lives, especially regarding access to healthcare and risk of mortality from unsafe living conditions, in this case, relating to the opioid crisis and its continuation through the life of a newborn, the next generation. Having been personally impacted on multiple levels through losses as a result of the opioid epidemic, I wanted to highlight the language points that reflect how this now decade and a half-long public health tragedy continues to intergenerationally affect our society and its future.
Source that inspired this piece: State of Tennessee (Circuit Court of Cumberland County at Crossville, Tennessee) and Baby Doe vs. Purdue Pharma et al, second amended complaint filed 4/1/19.

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Kelly O’Rourke is a poet and teacher. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English from San Francisco State University. Her work has been published in the USA, UK, Italy, Hong Kong and Ireland, including in Crab Orchard Review, The Hong Kong Review, HCE Review, The A3 Review, Transfer Magazine, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana and others, and can be found at: www.kellyaorourke.com.

Two Poems by Sheila Black

Recovery

Who would not want the ability to so transform?
Even the cost – terrible – not impossible, but terrible.
He cut off three of his own fingers in a state of inconsolable mourning
For what? Lightness, air, the speed of letting go
of the heavy body. It shouldn’t be so hard to love ourselves.
Here the autumn orchards, the earth—even the view from
the highway this morning. A cardinal floating between
two bare branches. I can’t give you the answers. I fill out
forms which ask questions that feel intrusive or shameful
or beside the point. Why have I failed to love you enough
to make you well? Only fairy tales offer consolation—their
long time frames, the palpable constrained style
in which great sacrifices are described and also enormous
cruelties. We can be different figures in these stories.
Today you are the girl who climbs a tree and refuses to speak.
I am the gray bird who was once a mother. I believe in the arrow
fired at random which nevertheless leads to precisely
the one path that will take you through this place,
which is to say I believe in the kind of engine that opens
inside you—a stuttering at first, but then a humming
for what is right here. We are walking the perimeter
this November morning—so many declinations of blue
in one cold sky. I hold my faith in wheels, in seasons,
in the fact that this morning you consumed without prompting
a half slice of dry toast. You drank a glass of apple juice.
You said you wanted more.

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Demeter Remembers

Some things are only for spring:
the feel of new grass,

night falling like curtains.
the body practicing how it will walk out of itself.

She stakes her place in winter:
a woman in a field of snow, arms over her head.

calling to the dogs who run
awkwardly though the thick-packed wet.

She has sent them looking
for something she knows they will not find.

She tells her friend on the phone
of walking the liminal spaces of the hospital

where her baby in a blue incubator
angled for light.

She could feel the desolation of inside–what had been
torn or excised,

and understood in a kind of flash
the logic of vanishing.

She walked a long way
to the parking lot to pretend to smoke

and watch headlights turn on, engines purr,
and the chassis

drag away into plains dark.

It was a small Western city; the medical care
unexceptional. The baby made it,

but she was winter now, Starlings in their nests
under the eaves

tightly packed in snow.

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Author’s note: Both these poems came out of difficult mothering experiences. My youngest daughter, who "Recovery" is about, struggled with an eating disorder as a teenager. The poem is about the helplessness I felt during that period but also the wonder of watching her recover and step back into her life. I think the poem focuses on the precarity of moving through the world - through light and dark passages of time. The second ("Demeter Remembers") applies the myth of Demeter to my experiences as a young mother with a child in the NICU. Again, I think I was a bit obsessed - perhaps because these poems were both written during early days of the pandemic - with how much living is a process of coping with uncertainty and the grave emotional rifts that all mothers face at some point almost as a matter of course.

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Sheila Black is the author most recently of a chapbook All the Sleep in the World (Alabrava Press, 2021). Her fifth full-length book, Radium Dream, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Spectacle, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, the New York Times, and elsewhere. She works for AWP and lives in San Antonio, Texas.