originally published in Wildroof Journal’s Substack

For a long time, my writing focused on domestic relationships, often between a married couple or a mother and her child. Settings were key. So was “white space,” things unsaid but made clear by gestures and where the eye would fall during and after a difficult conversation. The natural world featured prominently. Western landscapes, light, and winter weather reminiscent of where I grew up in Upstate New York appeared over and over.

I was not a political writer. That is, I didn’t write about the larger world where injustice landed on people and made life impossible. My battles were always personal, pitting the individual against herself in a dire struggle for self-expression and self-acceptance. To name the hidden dream and pursue it—for a long time was all I needed.

Then the world changed. The Republicans were never subtle about it, it’s just that their years of being highly organized and ruthless in intent and practice brought their misogyny to the fore. The Supreme Court reversed fifty years of reproductive autonomy for half the population without batting an eye.

The women in my prose had always been fierce even when depressed, miserable, totally at sea in the storm of their own confusion. In my poetry, women’s rage blazes across the page. Line by line my writing took on a distinctly political tone that remains now, six years after I wrote my first poem. And in those six years, the situation for women in this country has worsened.

My poems are often about domination, discrimination, violence, rape, forced birth, and disenfranchisement. My third poetry collection, which arrives in December from Unsolicited Press, is called Diary of a False Assassin. The use of the word “false” mimics the constant plaint of fake news.

The title poem is about a woman who discovers she’s pregnant and decides to terminate the pregnancy. It’s not a long piece, so I will present it here:

It starts with love or a lot of like

He’s crazy cute, right?

He’ll say anything to make you let him

It takes you by surprise

Even though you know how it works

Hoping it wouldn’t ≠a plan to prevent it

You don’t tell anyone

Then you tell everyone

Have it, don’t have it

Here’s the number of the clinic

I’ll drive you, myself

It’s out-of-state

If you don’t have it, you’re a murderer

Puzzle of the day: if that thing in your stomach

Has no brain and no heart, why is it more

Important than you?

Because you have no value

Except to bear things

You’re an incubator

An earthen vessel

And now, with a thought to your

Own future, a killing machine

A false assassin

Not all the poems in the book are overtly political. Many are about nature, art, getting older, what it’s like to be married to the same person for many decades. I think all these things carry the obvious weight of inevitability. For instance, nature is inevitable because our ability to find beauty in it persists, regardless of what we’re going through. Art, too, particularly the urge to create, never leaves us, whether we’re drawn to music, painting, or prose.

On this topic I can dig pretty far back into my personal history. I majored in Economics in college and learned the concept of maximizing one’s utility. This lofty yet vague term basically means someone does what’s best for herself, usually in a consumer setting. But often the theory is applied to human behavior in general and I found myself thinking about painting. Why, for instance, did Vermeer choose to paint and not compose music? And only a few years later, when I grabbed writing as my passing star, why did it, and not fine arts call my name?

I still have no answer, but I find that where creation is concerned, I need to explore the hunger to capture reality, and to suggest to my readers that capturing is a quest for ownership. So is the need to manipulate reality, not just to render or claim it. In a poem about Francoise Gilot, one of Picasso’s wives and a very talented painter in her own right, I ask “What makes something ours? / Knowledge = possession?” However we explain it or decide what it may mean, the need to create is inevitable.

So, too, is the need to be free from tyranny. Any student of history knows that oppressed people will try to throw off their chains until they succeed. And people who are bent on control will always try to oppress. How to convey to them that their personal freedom need not be predicated on the enslavement of another?

The answer, I think, is to keep the conversation going. Ask the hard questions.  Turning again to politics truths, I offer another poem in the book, “Surrender.”

Mixed on a palette

Caressed and smudged

We’ve no choice but to blend

Assimilate, lose ourselves,

Surrender to great numbers and hues

And when we’ve lost all sense of who

We once were, we find we’ve made

A dull mass of brown or gray,

Neutral, easy on the eye, ask any decorator

Trying to stage a house for sale

Is that what racists fear? The loss of white

Skin? Or the sameness of tone that would make it

Hard to be in charge, pull the trigger, tie the rope?