Poetry / Martha Silano
:: Terminal Surreal ::
or is it surreal terminal? Something’s going on with my mitochondria. Something to do with oxidation. My cells need help with ridding my body of toxins, which explains the bear bile I drank twice daily until it turned out it was doing nothing but making me nauseous. Surreal swirl of feta cheesecake topped with macerated cherries. Ooh, that tastes good. My husband calls to tell me he just heard the first red-winged blackbird of the season, saw bald eagles dive-bombing mergansers. I’m just sitting here pretending I don’t have ALS, that somehow, I’ll live. 50 degrees and partly sunny: my kind of day! To forget, while I’m listening to honking geese, that yesterday a friend went into hospice, that the amount of misery is equal to or greater than the number of eggs a termite queen will lay in a lifetime—165 million. I learned today about the mountain stone weta, a cricket that, when it gets cold, freezes 85% of its body. When the blizzard passes, it comes back to life. Meanwhile, another eagle’s flying overhead, this one solo, heading south until it’s out of sight.
:: Abecedarian on a Friday Morning ::
Almost like it was, this moment, this juncture of blood pumping from arteries, back through veins, circling in and out of chambers, my heart’s pending demolition, like the not-for-billionaire’s buildings east and west of us, like these sturdy, strapping legs for how long strong? I walked them yesterday past gators and a pileated woodpecker, a blue-headed vireo hardly visible in the wax myrtle, its white-spectacled eyes, the good news of its population on the rise. Just before, I heard a cardinal in the cattails, the kkkkrrrr kkkrrr of a little blue heron in lettuce leaves I learn are native or introduced (fossils in Wyo- ming and India). It’s hunting for insects, fish, maybe a North Florida hopper, a tadpole, or the elusive Okefenokee fishing spider, who knows, or a pig frog, which I was really hoping to see. Questions arise throughout our deep dive into racoon love as four babies making high-pitched squeaks run along the boardwalk, stopping only to make sure their pals are still nearby, cuz no one, us included, wants to be alone when they die. When this vacation from the void closes shop, my lungs losing their winsome urge to rise and fall, when I can no longer xxx and ooo, even via text, breathe deep the gathering gloom, yak, yap, yawn, yes, yarn, yield, or do that lub-dub thing, until zapping myself with a cocktail takes me where I haven’t been.
From the writer
:: Account ::
The deal is that in November 2023 I was diagnosed with ALS. I knew something weird was going on with my body in early 2023, but it took at least six months to wend my way from doctor, to doctor, to doctor, to neurologist. When I first found out I was terminal, I did everything I could to pretend it wasn’t true, that this couldn’t be happening to me (aka magical thinking). In early 2024, I could still walk five miles, but then it dwindled to two miles, then one mile, then half a mile, then to no walking at all except around our home and to the front yard to sit on my trusty chaise longue, where I birdwatch, look up at the sky, and watch/listen to songbirds. Today, thanks to a small dose of amphetamine, I’m able to spend a little more time on that chaise, or in my bed for hours, writing and revising poems, reading books about the natural world, and doing way too many crossword puzzles. As I was coming to terms with my diagnosis,I used poetry to make sense of what was happening to me, poems that combine the daily challenges of living with a neurological disorder with the medical, the metaphysical, the cosmological, along with the wonders of the plants and animals that I am grateful to engage with daily.
Martha Silano has authored seven poetry collections, including, most recently, This One We Call Ours, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Poetry Prize (Lynx House Press, 2024), and Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. Acre Books will publish Terminal Surreal, a book about Silano’s experience of living with ALS, in the fall of 2025. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Terrain.org, The Missouri Review, New England Review, and American Poetry Review, and in many print anthologies, including Cascadia: A Field Guide Through Art, Ecology, and Poetry (Mountaineers Books, 2023), Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy (Trinity University Press, 2019), and the Best American Poetry series (Norton, 2009).. Awards include North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize. Her website is available at marthasilano.net.