Otter Valley
Stick season hits later here,
trees still soaked in gold
or roadkill blood. Here, one America
touches another. Everyone knows
otters hold hands, but they also fuck
you up if you try to hurt their young.
I pull up to a stoplight, clocking
the soccer mom in the minivan
beside me. My hands grip
and prickle, imagining her hooded
in a booth last Tuesday,
blackening the oval
by his name, making it
darker and darker.
Julia C. Alter
Julia C. Alter is the author of Some Dark Familiar (Green Writers Press, 2024), selected by Matthew Olzmann as the winner of the 2023 Sundog Poetry Book Award. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and appears widely in journals and anthologies. She lives in Vermont with her son.
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
Well first off, yeah this is very me coded.
The tension between mothers seeking what's good for their children vs seeking what's good for them and the harm that can come from that goes CRAZY! There’s also so much rage. Rage that I felt a lot in November. I found myself as reader both repelled and compelled by the rage. Does that soccer mom deserve rage? We don’t really know, we just know the speaker assumes so. Is the speaker safe in the valley they live in? Then you get the shock of otter’s fucking (line break) up people who mess with their kids. Is the speaker a mother with kids who are being messed with? Is the speaker a child whos mother also voted for Trump? There are some many question being raised here for me that I really found myself moved by the poem. I think if this were a movie and not a poem, we’d get more complicated about the soccer mom, but because it’s a poem we don’t. We don’t know for sure who she voted for, the poem won’t tell us, so maybe as readers we get to decide. The line breaks, the tension between the colors red, black, and gold. All of it is a really powerful examination forcing the reader to decide for themselves what is happening and what isn’t.
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
The otters (:
How did you go about pairing otters with motherhood with the election season?
Around the time of the election, I found myself feeling a primal sense of protectiveness towards my son that felt new in its intensity. There was also a strange sense of circling back, as I was pregnant with him during Trump’s first election, before I knew what being a mother meant. My son is growing up in a depraved world, the way all of our children are. As the depravity and fear and horror increase, so does the love I am able to access for my son. It’s a constant leveling up, and digging down deeper. The way I love him is soft and some would say gentle, but it carries a kernel of danger within it; what I might be capable of if anyone tried to hurt him. The otter felt like the right creature to hold this complexity, and so did the soccer mom, in her way.
I know this may be an obvious question but this hinges on the 2024 election (which will be a few months passed by the time this goes up) but what was your revision process like for this, and what kind of frame of mine were you in when you wrote it?
I tend to not do a lot of revision on my poems. Other poets might have strong feelings about this! We can talk about it. Often by the time I sit down to write a poem, it already knows what it wants to be and I just have to give it space to come through. My partner, who is also a poet—and always my first reader—gave me the word “hooded”, which I couldn't pass up. In a poem this short, every word is pulling a lot of weight, and this felt like an important addition. Adding “hooded” gives a delayed twist to the image and adds a texture of shame or secrecy and gives some more charge to “darker and darker”.