Poet Laureate Poem Prompts

Peggy Shumaker is the daughter of two deserts—the Sonoran desert where she grew up and the subarctic desert of interior Alaska where she lives now.  Shumaker was honored by the Rasmuson Foundation as its Distinguished Artist.  She served as Alaska State Writer Laureate. She received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Shumaker is the author of eight books of poetry, including Cairn, her new and selected volume. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA at PLU. She serves on the Advisory Board for Storyknife, and on the board of the Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation. Shumaker is editor of the Boreal Books series (an imprint of Red Hen Press), editor of the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press, poetry editor of Persimmon Tree, and contributing editor for Alaska Quarterly Review.

For more information on Shumaker’s background, please see her website, which is also the source of this short bio.

It might interest our readers to know that Peggy Shumaker collaborated with Willawaw’s first cover artist, Kesler Woodward. His images and her words are documented in the book, Blaze.

When a jasmine-scented
teenager (not yet my mother)

came up pregnant
with me, my father

stepped up.
They did what teenagers did

in 1951.  Married.
Mismatched

spectacularly–
fifteen years of yelling and beer.

Four kids and two
miscarriages

before she turned
twenty-four.

No education
past high school.

So after the divorce,
crap jobs,

crappier men,
government cheese,

no sleep.
Haunted, her eyes.

There are men
making decisions

right now
about lives of girls

and women.
Some do not want

children to know
how their bodies work.

Some do not trust
women to make

decisions.  As if
women were people,

as if women
know what’s best

for their lives,
for the lives

of their children.
That broken teen

who carried me, who
pushed me out

into this world,
that brilliant

ragged girl
died young, worn down

in her thirties.
One small life,

I know.  The only life
she had.  I speak for her

when I say
Let women live.

Let women be.

 

This poem was first published in Cutthroat:  Truth to Power Special Issue and also opens Shumaker’s latest collection, Cairn. 

my mother sits on an airport bench in Reykjavik
soft waves of hair the graceful drift of her scarf
pearls across the vee of her throat
she is the first lady of her sprawling family

ahead lies a year in the dim light of Copenhagen:
beds cots and crib to sleep nine in a vine-
covered third-floor apartment with attic
French windows opening onto a balcony deep
as a pair of feet but too weak to bear her weight

mornings are a sock-of-a-coffee-filter round the rim of red
enamelware at the red-checkered kitchen table
clang of half-dozen brown milk bottles at the landing
breakfast of cornflakes and real butter tooth-thick on dark rye

she drinks dark beer eats freshly fried pork rinds
fermented fish the smell stronger than Limburger cheese
fells the youngins upwind as the adults dine below

her husband bathes the children in a plastic tub on Saturdays
long neck of a shower wand above the sink
an enchantment for the kids the swans at Frederiksberg Park
like the zoo like the lights of the Tivoli Gardens

she sends her brood to school in the rain
a badelynge of ducks in a parade of blue ponchos
as they cross cobblestones climb into trolleys

she fades a little in the dark and damp
four-year-old at her hip she is never alone
her thyroid slows she gives over to ulcers

the future holds her convalescence
on a beach south of Barcelona
long legs warmed in the hot sand
enough sunlight to re-ignite her dreams

 

“Peggy Shumaker’s piece about her mother reminded me of one I had written about my own, both women ‘staying the course’ through marriage and multiple pregnancies. We mustn’t forget the cost.”

“So this is a Sabbatical” was first published in Barton’s chapbook, Out of the Woods, 2017.