Suzanne Edison, MA, MFA

Poet • Educator

Poems

Poetry helps me find “the place beyond words.” We poets use words to point ourself and others toward those ineffable places. When this water of 'being' is running through me, I write for the joy of participating and the hope of learning something new. If my words then touch others I am rewarded a second time.

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The Examined Life, Ars Medica and other projects

I am pleased to say that my poem Bloodwork was published in The Examined Life: A Literary Journal of the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in their Spring 2012 issue.  This school of medicine also holds a yearly conference by the same name, The Examined Life, and is one of a handful of schools involved in Narrative Medicine and that offers courses in Medical Humanities.  I recommend checking out the school/conference and this volume.

I also have a poem forthcoming in the next issue of Ars Medica.  Stay tuned for that wonderful journal from Toronto, Canada.  While their website is not really up to date, I would suggest asking for their most recent journal issues in a personal email to them.  And while you’re at it, ask them to update their website!

Lastly, I wanted to say I am working on a new set of poems about parents whose children are living with a chronic illness.  I was awarded another grant from the City of Seattle Arts and Cultural Affairs program to pursue this project. I am interviewing parents whose kids have Sickle Cell disease, Juvenile Arthritis, Muscular Dystrophy and one or two other illnesses.  They come from a variety of backgrounds and I am trying to capture both the unique specifics and overlapping issues, common in all of their, and my, experiences.

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“Bloodwork” wins Honorable Mention

I was overjoyed to hear that a poem of mine won an honorable mention in a contest. While it would have been nice to win first or second place, the very fact of having a piece of poetry read and respected goes a long way in the heart and mind of a writer.  Poetry has such a small corner of the publishing world that finding readership is the proverbial hunting needles in haystack task. It is one thing to spend time writing poetry, arguably the hardest part, but another thing altogether to then search out places that might accept your work, read it, publish it.  So I am grateful to the unseen faces, to the unknown judges who decided that this poem was worth “mentioning” among 150 submissions.

In the larger context of writing about illness, caretaking and medicine, there is a growing appreciation of the role that the arts has in healing.  More on that and the new, wonderful anthology, The Healing Art of Writing, currently available, in my next blog.

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Bloodwork

The live-wire of my body,
vigilant tuning fork, vibrates low.
Watching you walk, run, heave
a mottled brown ball toward netted hoop—impossible
to dream—a braided vision
of normality—I am no longer a chicken
pecking circles round your every moment,
as if that dance kept me from being
unzipped, or you, from falling.

Yet, each time your labs return
a notch too high or, a milky fog appears
inside one eye and your knuckles flare, grated
red, I curse the resurrected
hope-wagon I thought to ride on.
Still full of flint, ready for conflagration,
I would strip bark with my teeth, slice
the neck of pestilence—a fenestration
for cords coiled from my hair and flayed skin—
plait a lasso, harness, bower, anything
to keep the sky clear
of your unfurling.

 

(an earlier version to be published in Fall 2011 by UCSF Press Healing Art of Writing anthology)

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Teeter Totter

No one wants to talk about the sick child,
corrugated sadness, apologies baited with fear
the mouse-trap faces of those with healthy kids, shut.

Nobody wants to stand too close to disease,
the thieving rat reaches into pockets,
through the body’s bars, swipes
skin-lush, flown-open dreams.

Stuck in binocular vision, I watch my child teeter
towards the ground. I should move, sit on her end
of the see-saw, leave the others
up in the air.

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