So many things went wrong during the birth of my son Leo eight years ago that the obstetrician who delivered him described our experience as being like that scene at the end of Return of the Jedi, when the Millennium Falcon just manages to fly out of the Death Star before it explodes.
In other words, we made a very narrow escape.
Maybe it’s cliche to say that the rejection slip is a great metaphor for life and the many times a day we hear “no”—from a boss, a crush, a loan officer, a blood test, a judge. That we choose to seek out more rejection than life already hands us—I marvel at our particular brand of masochism.
But I get, now, why I’ve held onto that folder. It doesn’t chide me that I’m not working hard enough; it reminds me how hard I’ve worked already. And it’s testimony to my growth, too. An editor’s words don’t slay me like they used to. The yeses come more frequently now. It took fifteen years, but my poetry manuscript recently got accepted.
All lost time runs by in your dreams
Are you still alive in your dreams?
…
Buy Ghazals for Foley (Hinchas Press, 2016)
Arriving in California
just before Thanksgiving,
I’d say I felt pensive
if pensive were the sensation
of one billion thoughts colliding
in the cerebral cortex,
not pinprick stars,
more like dark matter chaos,
more like an unweaving,
a de-constellating,
the loss of any sense of order,
of any sense of navigation,
as if the parking tickets were papered everywhere—
and the email had begun to explode—
and the cars all crashed into one another—
and all the marriages torn asunder—
the children unborn—
all the tools tossed into the sea—
if there were a sea—
if there were any stars by which to navigate—
Terra Ojeda: Do you have a writing routine? If so, what does it look like?
Susie Meserve: I do have a writing routine—of sorts. My mantra is, ‘write first, before everything else.’ If I try to start my paid work first, or start with paying bills or anything else, I never get to the writing.
I'm working from the premise that motherhood is not just all diapers, tantrums, and setting limits. It's interesting. Okay, sometimes. 