NaFaCaMo 29

three poems

Headshot of woman in glasses, smiling, with gray shoulder-length straight hair that has a pink streak in it

For the penultimate day of NaFaCaMo, I introduce you to poet Suzanne Edison. To tell you the truth, I have no idea how I met Suzanne beyond the world wide webs, but I had the great fortune of taking an online poetry workshop with her during the pandamnic and have been a deep admirer of her art. Her first full length book, Since the House Is Burning, by MoonPath Press was published in 2022. Her chapbook, “The Body Lives Its Undoing,” was published in 2018. Poetry can be found in: Bracken; Michigan Quarterly Review; Lily Poetry Review; Whale Road Review; Scoundrel Time; JAMA; SWWIM; and elsewhere. She is a 2019 Hedgebrook alum and teaches at Richard Hugo House in Seattle and through UCSF. As you can guess, she’s also a MoFaCa.

She was kind enough to give me permission to post three of her beautiful poems.

Still Life Without Skull

The infusions were pulsed too fast, 
and the doctor admitted her mistake, 
but the jack-hammering in my child’s head 
went on for days, not to be medicated away. 
I watched my girl writhe on the floor like a worm
cut in half, and felt I was a captive in a new,
infernal circle. And though I can’t see 
or hold death in my arms, it ticks 
in us; I think of old Dutch paintings 
thick with vermillion, pomegranates, 
over-ripe grapes blooming 
from true black. Half-eaten meats house 
a congregation of flies, tenacious 
strings of gristle and lemon peels dangle 
over the table’s edge. Here, there is no skull,
but the sparrow’s eye flickers, 
a watch chain in its mouth.


When My Child Fell Ill
 
what didn’t kill me, left me 

drained as bleached coral, 
	spongiform, a holy mess
				in unmapped reefs. 

What didn’t kill me lassoed
	years from sleep, 
				stole cabinets of dreams,

chewed up the story lines 
	where monsters never stray from closets,
	
or else disappear by morning.
	
Other mothers fretted over pox and croup, 
	buzzed about their soccer stars, piano prodigies.
	
Well-wishers sent their remedies saying,  
	leave it to God, 
				and stayed away. 

		*

What didn’t kill 
	put no substance on my frame, 
				did not gift me a badge, 
				
or crown, did not ennoble.
	
Stripped and salted, I left God 
	in her wheelhouse, wandered
				the over lit corridors of medicine, challenged 

their priests and litanies.

		*

You’ve prayed for the day when you’ll turn
	to see your child
				still swollen with drugs, 

packing sand into buckets, surrounding
	herself with a castled home, and 

like Galileo with his telescope, finally
	finding the multiple moons of Jupiter, 
				her illness reveals itself, 

one part of a larger constellation.
	Ursa Major. Well known to you, 
				but not the brightest star.


After Remission, Her First Tattoo

It wasn’t the needles, or punctured skin,
(rat-a-tat-tat, and repeat) that surprised me—
	she’d had years of infusions.

It wasn’t the ink
like an ant trail of dark blood—
	nothing we hadn’t both seen

in the vials siphoned monthly 
like crude oil from shale,
	that often sputtered or refused to flow.

It was the location she chose—
familiar bench of her left, inner arm
	exposed and soft as morning haze

where once tubes were tied 
above her bulbous vein.

And the image, in Roman numerals, 
their heft like those carved on a tombstone,
	engraved on a sundial or gold coin—

a code one must decipher, 
something a future lover will rub his finger over 
	or kiss. 

The tattoo inscribed today marks 
an expiration to the platoons of bottles, pills
	lined up dutiful as soldiers;

marks four years since the gnat-swarm 
of her rash and weakness finally lay dormant
	like larvae in winter. 

And my gift is forgetting
the phlebotomist’s name 
 	that I once knew, by heart.