after her mare died, my sister bottle fed her colt
Commentary
When my writing is about other beings (human and non-human), I feel I should try to write something true about them as them, at least as far as I can from within the confines of my intellect and umwelt. I’m generally unsatisfied with poems that use other living beings only as metaphorical figures. In this poem, I try to seriously consider the women, the pantry moths, the calves, and the horses. Juxtaposing these lives allows me to explore the brutality of the scam while (I hope) not trivializing any of the lives or glossing over my own violence.
The places of this poem—a farm, my house—are sites of complex entanglement, reflecting my understanding of place. Pantry moths are a trivial pest in a residential context, but they’re a reminder that my house is a biome, with spiders and moths and flies and fungus, and oh so many minute things. And that mesh mirrors the way the people and enmeshed, for good and bad, in each other’s lives.
You will find a Google word doc accessible version of this feature here.
With thanks to the Poetry School.
Sarah Bitter is a writer from Seattle, Washington. Her poetry has been published in Denver Quarterly‘s FIVES, River Mouth Review, The Seventh Wave, and other publications, and has accompanied art at the Page Gallery and the Goldfinch Gallery, while her prose has been featured in Poetry Northwest and EcoTheo Review. Sarah has an MFA from the University of Washington.
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