“Yes, silence does follow the colon at the end of the poem, yet it could also imply possibility or the hope of possibility or it could imply more of the same.”
“Repetition also helped me depict the claustrophobia and exasperation of caring for an infant, especially when your body doesn’t do the work it is expected to.”
“I often write in the third person, using my first name Margaret. I suppose it is a way of trying to render how we can feel so separate from ourselves, always observing.”
“I don’t know if I know yet where this poem lives, though it lives somewhere close to me. So the title as an address is a reaching, or a call to which maybe, hopefully, there will sound a response.”
“It’s meant to be something of a self-indictment. This moment is peaceful, yes, but in part because of what the speaker is choosing to exclude. The privacy provided by the trees protects the speaker and also discourages her from considering the world beyond her own comfort.”
“We hauled furniture and filled our mouths with chewing tobacco. We spent holidays together in a halfway house. Ryan was human – wonderful, kind, compassionate, creative, but also deeply, fundamentally, afraid and mean and sick. He died. I didn’t.”
“I think of poems as a sort of dance between tension and resolution, where some images or ideas seem to raise the stakes while others provide a release or otherwise alter whatever dynamic is at play.”
“As both a writer and violinist, I’m constantly surrounded by discourse on the tangible power of art and literature in real life and have always believed in such power myself.”
