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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“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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Cartography

The fault line of child’s scalp
once unmapped, exposed, incised
from nape to forehead, nubby

cross-stitch swollen pink no
French knot elegance,
the doctor dusted off blade, this mother

steeled herself against sultry sinew,
against fracas of molecules pooling
where she wants incisive decision

no clapboard dashed-together nail
and rail affair—she wants tender
at the bone, the territory charted,

each one’s scan like Saturn’s
rings, familiar.
Light passes through orbital

bone, socket of eye, the world
her child sees but doesn’t
yet know, masses outside the gate..