How "Flatwood" came about

I’ve decided to start sharing some previously published pieces here, as the anniversaries of their publication come up. Instead of just posting the piece, I’ll do a little recollecting, a little excavating of where the piece came from and how I feel about it.

The first poem in the series I’m super inventively calling “How [poem] came about” is one really, really close to my heart. I revised and then submitted “Flatwood” for literal years before Burrow Press’s awesome Fantastic Floridas blog picked it up & released it 2 years ago today. 

It has a home in the perennial publishing bridesmaid Live oak nearly on fire, the manuscript I’ve been shopping around (and minorly tinkering with) for…several years now. So it still feels vital and important to me as the day I drafted it. But it was born long ago, during one spring break at UC Irvine. My cohort and a few others in the community did a “poem a day” project that week, writing and sharing a poem every day via email chain. I wrote this one in my husband’s (then boyfriend’s) bedroom in his on-campus apartment, staring out at eucalyptus and agave, which felt sort of like a Californian answer to our pine forest. I sent it along with the note “memory spillage”. Friend and former teacher Colette Labouff Atkinson responded with “nice!”—and because reading and commenting is usually not required during these generative, accountability-based projects, that was enough for me to keep going with it. 

The revision was filled with google image searches, conversations with my parents about which plants I was misremembering, a reminder from my uncle that the cardinals were really red robins (or vice versa? I can’t remember which version I landed on at this precise moment).

As I focused first on hyper-accuracy to the environment, the story only slowly coalesced around my sister –some of the games played with the “you” in the poem were actually, in “real life”, played with my childhood best friend Amber. But it didn’t matter. It was about my sister, and about the small corner of our childhood world that was undistilled beauty, and what it felt like to confront tragedy from within it — and the tragedy, ultimately, of it all burning down.

I still feel hypnotized by “Flatwood”, and the memories, as I read it, and the long sentences beg me to read them out loud:

Princeton, opening in far-south Dade County between the wedge of I-95 and Dixie Highway, bore flats of slash pines with loose-chunked bark and tops too high for shade, and under their topple Florida holly peppered green with shots of red. Johnson grass held sun, sowed savannah colors, obscured itself in rustle; around the ferns hammock plants mingled—strangler figs’ muscle split into finger-coating papaya scent peeling gumbo-limbo’s burn, mahogany squatted beside with woody petals of pod.

We searched for the few grapes (for arbors, for swooning under like swooning ladies), we coveted the hotpink rosary peas we knew would kill at our tongue on their scarab backs, we dared each other to pick them, we wiped our hands on silver saw palmetto blades—thick dusty-green fans on their thick bodies, fans that thwacked when we waved them, against themselves like sails, in wind, and around us the crows, and the whippoorwill that years later we found, remember we found out, was not a whippoorwill but a burrowing owl scouting the land that our parents didn’t touch, that stayed like a pebble in a pocket still in Florida’s growth—still for the owl and tree frogs, for the cats from up the road at the shelter (or from near it, dropped at the skidding curve on two-thirty-second off Allapattah)—for those cats and bufo toads and rattlesnakes and the dogs who tried to eat them and then lay belly-up in the road—

and then soon we’d have Gypsy 2, or Snail 2 (daughter of the matron Bran, Snail 1 was wheat-colored, large and horse-built, but lean, and we called her Snail, because she quick-skittered all over the place; when we patted her side she and her namesakes heaved and taildown ran into the Florida holly, hiding there for days, shivering, especially in summer—especially in summer when afternoons took in blooms of steel, ate them and them out on sky, thunder’s bellied hum, she shivered afraid, in the ferns under the switching twigs of false holly, of the lightning that came close, the lightning that kept us loping in the gray-green light, in the drops that made everything smell like muscling-up).

Pure poisonous beauty, pure fairy tale, pure draught of sensory experience. (Finish here .)

Reading it now, I’m still not sure about the form. It seems to have gotten goofed up on the Fantastic Floridas page since I last looked, but honestly that could also have been some strange thing I was trying at the time. It has switched back and forth between prose and verse, between numbered sections and simple stanza breaks. 

Because “Flatwood”, more than almost any other poem I’ve written, lives in my ears and eyes—takes the unadulterated form of inchoate memory—it may be that I have not enough distance from it to see its proper container clearly. It lives. I’m still living it. 

Another Florida poem, not yet published, about the two worlds I lived in as a child – Princeton and the fantastically wealthy Coconut Grove, to oversimplify it – is similarly in flux, formally. I don’t think I’ve found the Wordsworthian “tranquility” needed for either, and in fact it barely feels like a “recollection” at all (for non-poets, please cf. this Wordsworth quote: “poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility”). 

It could be, too, that the story of “Flatwood” should emerge earlier. The real story, the tragedy in the fairy tale, the story of my sister and I growing up in and then outgrowing the Flatwood – the mythical place, the forest rife with both magic and monsters, that is no longer. 

Today is an H-free day, it’s as muggy and dark gray outside as a Florida summer afternoon (if cooler), and I’m continually glancing off the edges of the other essay/post I’m working on. So how about this. How about I enter that forest again, and reimagine “Flatwood”—for the first time since having a kid, in fact – see if I can make more of it.