Mothers and Others
Our first night in the D.R. we took a motoconcho to a town
on the coast, now in Mexico we rent our own bike to carry
us to the Italian woman’s restaurant. The Italian woman’s
restaurant: an alcove cut into dated concrete, a sprawling
branched tree dotted with fairy lights, a trailer fitted for cooking,
a robust menu of salsas and South American wines. Her chef tongues
allegiance to six different languages and offers recommendations
for all things tattooed in town. What others? He’ll ask, and I’ll consider
how to frame this, as I chew, his tagliatelle composting in
my gut, an inked mer-woman peering furtively from beneath
his folded shirtsleeve. A family recipe made to swallow. There
is an inheritance, I think. Something that swells its way down
a family line, like a snake passes a mouse. Something propelled
by muscle, or alchemy. Either way – it will emerge, gasping at
the surface. At the surface. At the surface of what? A tortilla chip
dipped in tomato sauce, crack in the bowl. A lost half, no matter.
The mer-woman pulses. I think of cost and place my fork down.
Meredith MacLeod Davidson
Meredith MacLeod Davidson is a poet and writer from Virginia, currently based in Scotland, where she earned an MLit in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Meredith has poems in Propel Magazine, Cream City Review, Poetry South, Frozen Sea, JMWW, and elsewhere.
Why Taylor Loves It:
I think the tone of this is immaculate. There is, all at once, this incredible scene being set, fantastic moments of contemplation, and some incredible line breaks. I love when couplets make me feel like the poem is about to shatter in my hands, and I'm seeing that fully in this poem.
And I'm a sucker for a killer line, and this poem is full of them. "A family recipe made to swallow. There/is an inheritance, I think" for example, or the image of the snake swallowing a mouse. I mean, my goodness, how often do we actually stop and think about the muscles required to swallow?
Of course, that ending. Leaving readers holding it thinking, hopefully too, of the cost of inheritance, who we didn't choose and who we did, how our bodies carry lineage and culture, and the tangible evidence that we have lived.
Interview:
If you could have one famous poet read this poem and love it, who would it be and why?
That's a pretty impossible question to answer (seriously, this is me finally typing a response after staring at my wall for twenty minutes unable to make a decision), so I'm gonna do a bit of a cop-out by telling you a few. I'd love to have this poem meet the minds of many of my favourite poets whose work grapples with what I see as similar themes: Sylvia Plath, Kathryn Neurnberger, Jenny Xie, Taylor Johnson, Lucien Darjeun Meadows, and more. I like to think our poems could have little chats, maybe in a nice sunny park somewhere, with some snacks.
What did revisions look like for this? Did it come out fully formed, or was there a longer process?
Oh boy. This baby has been cooking for so long, I was starting to feel completely dissociated from it. I was almost at the point where I'd edited it so much I wasn't even sure it was my own (experiencing the uncanny valley of poetry, maybe?). I spent several months in Mexico in 2022 and had all this imagery swirling about in my mind, and I sort of channeled these ideas I'd been thinking about (all related to matrilineal creative inheritance specifically) through the funnel of these images and onto the page. So yes, it mostly came out fully formed in terms of the language, but the form was a whole 'nother thing. This had originally started as the opening to a short story, but I realized while editing the story that it was a completely separate thing, and in fact, a poem. From there, it was submitted many places as a prose poem, but didn't quite hit a lot of editors' marks for what a prose poem needs to be. I'm not a prose poem expert by any measure, so those editors may have been right, and I think recently I'm intrigued by the prose poem as claustrophobic in its block of text - communicating an intense closeness. That interrelationality, while true for the speaker in this poem, wasn't quite right in terms of striking the tone and feeling. I finally realized it needed to be broken into couplets, which I think helped to better communicate the tense enmeshment of families, countries, cultures, and other bodies which pass things (for better or worse) down through their children.
Why did you choose to submit to Team Taylor?
I had pieces I was wanting to send to both teams, but ultimately Team Taylor won out for me because A) I was trying to place this poem specifically, and B) because this poem specifically seemed (in my interpretation) to hit almost every one of your bullet points on the 'About' page - most obviously "poems about all the things we inherit from our varying cultures" but also the point about poems using the word "body" - a lot of my work has been very interested in exploring the embodied experience of trauma (and how this manifests on the page or in our art), so I felt the corporeal elements of the piece might connect for you too. Also, a snake is like, adjacent to a dinosaur, no?