Insomnia
Night after night, a great horned owl raises
a soft, slow hoot, claws into my almost
dreams, white as morning bones picked clean.
Toss in radiator swelter and rattle,
pings too high for sleep, too low for echolocation.
My eyes flutter from red to green to black breakers
over endless lake, they hover over yellow sclera,
obsessed with the raptors, their clenched talons
and the tapeworms hiding in their tracheas.
I wear the owl’s face, but never get the wings right.
To be able to soar the infinite air, my body light,
ligaments loosened and lambent, unaware of the river
roiling my wrists. I remember being born, slipping
from the hollowed darkness. I screeched then slept.
Pam Sinicrope
Pam Sinicrope has an MFA from Augsburg University and a doctorate in public health. Some of her work can be found in SWWIM, Spillway, Feral, The Night Heron Barks, Aethlon, Appalachian Journal, and 3 Elements Review. Pam lives in Rochester, MN, where she works as a medical writer and is a senior poetry editor for RockPaperPoem.
Why Taylor Loved it:
There is so much sensory action happening in the poem. We have sounds and colors and textures and each one brings a sense of realness to a poem that isn't based in realness at all. As the body becomes (or partially fails to become) an owl we have a dream sequence that I think many insomniacs can relate to.
I also wanna shout out the sound work, particularly in the second line, the 6th stanza, and the last stanza. Great sound work like this always makes me giddy. Ok and while I’m at it, couplets. I love couplets. The delicacy of couplets paired with the delicacy of sleep? Come on people this is the money stuff right there.
Also, this is a sneaky sonnet! The meaning that is revealed in the volta in the final two couplets is brilliant. In dreams the body is reborn, what is lost when the speaker cannot sleep?
Interview:
How did you approach the form when writing this piece? (I noticed it's 14 lines and appears to me to have a volta, did you intend that)?
The poem has been through many iterations. I live in Minnesota, and my backyard is full of wildlife. I was told that the woman who lived in the house before me hung roadkill from the tree limbs to feed the many raptors that visit. For months, I was woken from sleep by an owl’s incessant night-long hooting. This is where the poem began. I wrote maybe ten or eleven lines. The poem went into the sonnet form as I was searching for the discovery, the reason I felt compelled to write about the owl (other than that it was driving me insane). I abandoned the poem altogether for a couple of years. Maybe longer. Then, I workshopped the poem, and hearing it from other people's perspectives helped me see the writing in a new way. Only then could I go into the poem, loosen my conscious mind, and revise again. That is when the volta arrived, and with that, the ending came, too.
What did revisions look like for this? Did it come out fully formed, or was there a longer process?
I would guess I’ve revised the poem more than fifty times. Maybe more. The primary image stayed the same, but the meaning evolved and coalesced over the years. Writing in form, either traditional or one that is created, often provides the necessary scaffolding to keep a poem from disintegrating. I love to play with sound and constantly experiment with different words, phrases, and lineations until I feel a certain resonance in my gut. Some poems emerge very easily and quickly, whereas others (most for me) require extensive work and wordplay.
Why did you choose Team Taylor?
That’s easy. I write about god/God, sports, and the body. I have a soft spot for inventive animal poems. I love verbing, and I’m into dinosaurs (I even put them into one of my poems—see Literary Mama pub). Team Taylor!