Poetry / Aurora Shimshak

From the writer

:: Account ::

In my first MFA poet­ry work­shop at UW-Madi­son, our pro­fes­sor asked that we invent our own forms. That fall I was going for walks in a restored prairie close to my apart­ment, and the milk­weed along the path was plen­ti­ful. Dig­ging my thumb into one of their pods to release the fly­ing seeds felt like a slice of child­hood, a pathos appro­pri­ate to the mem­o­ry-based poems I was writ­ing. I looked up how many seeds a milk­weed pod held—200 to 250—and decid­ed my words would be those seeds, tight­ly packed, and that some of them would fly out to form their own poem.

I’ll put poems into milk­weeds when they’re not work­ing in oth­er forms. “Milk­weed to Unsor­ry” is a com­bi­na­tion of two poems that weren’t work­ing on their own—the first about my mother’s text mes­sages, the sec­ond about the sig­nif­i­cance of my niece crawl­ing into her lap.

“Milk­weed for the Bed­wet­ting Child” was a fif­teen page poem before I con­densed it into its lit­tle pod, keep­ing only the best lines and lan­guage. The fly­ing poem’s “shame gar­ment” tied to my stepmother’s throat was a sur­prise, new lan­guage that bub­bled up when I need­ed seeds to fly out. 

Auro­ra Shimshak grew up in sev­er­al rur­al com­mu­ni­ties and small cities in Wis­con­sin. Her work has appeared or is forth­com­ing in Best New Poets 2023, Cop­per Nick­el, and Poet­ry North­west, among oth­ers. She teach­es writ­ing to under­grad­u­ate stu­dents and those incar­cer­at­ed at Oakhill Cor­rec­tion­al Insti­tu­tion. Her man­u­script, Home Movie of a Girl Not Swim­ming, was a final­ist for Milkweed’s Bal­lard Spahr Prize.