Reading Guide:

This guide is intended to help readers interpret the poems in the way I wrote them, through the lens of my experience during my divorce. However, I believe that poetry can speak to people individually, and speak to their own life in different ways. Interpreting a poem in a way that is meaningful to you is incredibly valuable and meaningful, and I don’t want to discourage that. However, I want my poetry to feel accessible, so this is an attempt to help those who are new to poetry or simply curious to understand what the poems mean to me. This short guide explains some of the reasons why I wrote them the way I did and gives an insight into how they were created or what inspired them.

I recommend reading the poems alone before reading my personal interpretations so as not to damper your own ability to interpret or create personal connections.

Because these poems refer to my divorce, I will use ‘we’ to refer to my former husband and I, and ‘he’ to refer to just him. His name will not be mentioned at any point.

The Girl Who Swallowed the Sun

I identify as both the girl and the sun. The sun represents my true self, a person with feelings, desires, and needs that are all my own. I had to bury this true version of myself to present a version of myself that could be accepted by him. This false self is the girl. She has no wants or desires, does as she is told, and survives, but she is being destroyed from the inside.

I hated being this false version of myself. I was depressed. I felt lost and aimless. Eventually the inauthenticity and repression of wants became too unbearable, and my false self was no longer something I could maintain. In the poem, the sun burns its way free and reasserts itself, and this is my true self reasserting itself in my life.

However, the last line—” I am not meant just for burning” explores a common theme throughout the poetry book. The act of freeing myself had to be done forcefully, with anger. Anger was what gave me the power and courage to finally make things right. But I had never been an angry person, and this anger is not part of my true self either. Throughout my poems I explore my relationship with my anger.

Orchid

This is an example of one of my literal poems. Several of these I wrote about significant events that occurred during the divorce. In a meeting with our marriage counselor, after listening to him yet again refuse to acknowledge fault or express any desire to change, I asked for a divorce. He left the house that night. He returned the next evening to pick up a few things, tell me I would regret getting a divorce and that I needed to reconsider, and dropped off a potted orchid. “It will outlive our marriage. Just watch,” he said. He was right.

The Stranger I invited in

This poem again addresses a personified version of anger. Anger has become a significant figure—one who helped me realize all the wrongs that had been done against me and take control of my life.

But I hated being angry. I didn’t like the way I felt, not being able to think about anything but how I’d been wrong. It was a consuming feeling that I had never before experienced with such magnitude. I couldn’t focus on anything except escaping that situation. While anger saved me and finally allowed me to see the truth, I still rejected the anger I felt and wanted it to leave.

Thistle Seeds                                       

This poem is inspired by a story about a beautiful green meadow in the mountains near Archer, Idaho where some of my family comes from. Wild horses lived in the meadow, and one bad winter, the snow got too deep for the horses to find food to eat. Farmers brought bales of hay to feed the wild horses and they survived the winter, but after the snow melted, thistles started growing in the meadow, turning it from a green paradise to a thorny valley of weeds. Some of the hay had been contaminated with thistles seeds, and in saving the horses the farmers had doomed the meadow to thorns and weeds. Each year as the thistle seeds spread with the wind, the thistles grew and consumed the meadow.

I wrote this poem from the point of view of the horses, though it could’ve just as easily been written from the point of view of the seeds, the farmers, or the meadow itself to tell a different version of the story. I identified most with the horse. My marriage was my deep, dark winter. I compromised my own values, dreams, and wants just to survive, but at an incredible cost. The beautiful, innocent life I’d had before wasn’t something I could go back to. I now have to live with thorns.

The poem is written in short lines. This forces the reader to slow down as they read and heightens the sense of drama in the poem. There are several interesting breaks that change the reading that would occur in a poem with longer lines. For example, the poem starts “This meadow/Home/To the wild” and seems as if the sentence could stop there, but it goes on to use “wild” as a qualifier for “horses.” However, the reader still carries this sense that the meadow is home not just to the horses, but to the wild itself, and the meadow starts to take on a life of its own.

There is also some biblical reference in this poem, another common theme used in my poetry. The meadow is referred to as “Eden,” and the metaphor with Eden is further pushed with reference to “The bitter/Fruit–”. The thorns also have reference to Christ who wore a plait of thorns on the night of his crucifixion alongside the use of “Pierced.”So while partaking of the fruit and suffering through the dark night of the crucifixion thrust me out of my own Eden and into a world of thorns, it led to me finding knowledge as Eve did in the garden, and led to my own salvation as well.

Confusion

This is a favorite in the collection. It’s short. It’s simple. But it perfectly conveys the conflicting feelings of knowing I needed to leave a marriage and a life I had created with a person I once loved.

Eater

The Eater can either be characterized as my former husband or my anger. But it more closely aligns with how I felt about him. Throughout the marriage, I felt like every little piece of me–my opinions, my hobbies, my choices–was stripped away. Nothing I did ever pleased him. He was impossible to satisfy. When I finally gave up everything and became a shell of myself that had no opinions or wants, he was still not satisfied. I realized nothing I did could ever fulfill his Hunger.

The lie my teacher told me

In elementary school whenever the boys teased the girls (why was it always the boys?), we would sing “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

It was a lie. We all knew it. And yet we pretended that the words didn’t hurt. For all the hurt I felt in my marriage, I started to wish that there was some physical evidence of the way I was feeling inside that I could use to prove to myself that I was making the right choice in leaving. For so long, I thought I was just too sensitive, but no one should be expected to accept cruel words as if they don’t hurt.

Hyperventilation

This is another literal poem addressing my anger. The anger I felt had an unfamiliar and overwhelming power in my life.  

All the things that didn’t matter

These were all things we had fought over. My wishes were ignored or entirely dismissed. When my opinions were treated like they didn’t matter, I started feeling like I didn’t matter.

Can Opener

After we separated, he returned to pick up his half of everything we owned. I didn’t want to see him. I told him not to touch my personal items and then let him do whatever he wanted. My fragile new independent self didn’t have the strength to stand over his shoulder and ask over for things or demand that he leave a fair share.

After he left, I emerged from my room to absolute destruction. The kitchen shelves had been ravaged, boxes upended and their contents spilled everywhere, cabinets turned inside out. I waded through the mess to find something for dinner and pulled out a can of beans, but quickly realized there was no can opener. I was overwhelmed with the destruction and the realization of what I had done, tearing my life apart at the seams. This is the poem I wrote that night.

When did I realize

Confusion characterizes much of what I felt in the years and months leading up to the divorce. I didn’t understand why I was so unhappy. I couldn’t point to what was making me so miserable. I was married to someone I loved. This was supposed to be blissful. I felt like a planet trapped in an orbit on a continuous course of misery. Nothing I did seemed to help me feel better or change my situation. I felt trapped.

The words used in the second stanza are exactly the same as the first but in a different order, which feeds into this idea of endless spinning orbits, the same thing over and over and over again.  

Projection

I attended a conference to sell books a few weeks after we had separated. I sat across from an artist named Sarah Rene Kraft who was selling her incredible art. We got to talking and I found out that much of her art was inspired by her own divorce. Talking with her gave me hope that I so desperately needed. This poem is based on her painting ‘Half Gifts’ which I connected to very deeply and which now hangs in my room.

The Hole That Can’t Be Filled

One of the things he took with him when he moved out of the house was our shared toothpaste. He took many things we shared when he left, but this one felt more personal than the others, when I came to the sink to brush my teeth after that exhausting day and realized I couldn’t.

Snapped Twigs

The house we had bought together was deep in the Santa Cruz woods surrounded by towering redwoods. It was a little cabin with no insulation and was extremely cold during the winter, and we often lost power due to fallen limbs or storms, so we kept the house warm with the fireplace and limbs from the trees outside. I spent a lot of time breaking twigs and feeding the fire when I was angry.

Tomorrow I am a bear

This poem also addresses my anger. As my anger grew, so did my confidence, the space I took up in the world, and my own power to make decisions that were good for myself. But I was becoming something I didn’t recognize. I felt as though I had to become something I was not just to reclaim who I once was, but I knew this angry version of myself that demanded to be treated with respect wasn’t the truest version of myself. Nevertheless, it was the version I was forced to become. I hated it, but it was necessary. I wonder in this poem if “I am truly a hare/Soft and innocent?/Or a sparrow/Quick and melodic?” I yearn to be something soft and beautiful instead of ferocious and terrible.

Trickster

I am the bird. When we first dated and fell in love, I was treated with admiration and respect, but that didn’t even last through the honeymoon.

You asked too much

In this poem, he is (metaphorically) a vampire, and I, foolishly, let him drink my blood. I was constantly being asked to defer to him. My mom was always worried about me, because I was unwell, and she appears in this poem as she did often in my life wondering what had happened to me. But as was always the case during the marriage, the fault for my dizziness and weakness was mine, not his. The blood drinking wasn’t the issue–it was that I wasn’t eating as much spinach as I was supposed to. He was always trying to get me to put more and more effort into my wellness–medication, therapy, specialists, exercise, dieting–while ignoring the source of the problem.

I’m tired of living your life

This poem mentions specific luxuries I was not afforded in my marriage. Everything I had was shared. I didn’t feel I was allowed to take up space in my own life, or have anything that was meant just for me. Everything I was and everything I owned wasn’t really mine.

Becoming Pornography

This poem is made entirely of quotes. The capitalization comes from the quotes themselves, but the punctuation and ordering of the quotes is my own. I grew up Mormon, and the quotes come from religious handbooks and teachings from Mormon prophets and prominent leaders including Spencer W. Kimball, Ezra Taft Benson, and Elaine S. Dalton.

Religion was a large factor in bringing him and I together and in keeping me from feeling like I could leave the marriage, and the religious themes woven throughout the poems explore my complicated feelings toward my faith. This poem specifically explores the contradicting religious teachings directed toward faithful women. They are to make themselves meek and modest, yet desirable and alluring to their husbands. This was something I had to confront almost daily trying to please my husband and stay true to my own religious beliefs. I felt like my body and how it could exist in the world weren’t things I had control over.

Selfish

I was told I was selfish for wanting to do more than mother our child, spend time with him, and clean our house. Anything I did that was not contributing to his life was selfish.

Finally

The worst part of this poem is that I believed all these things needed to be changed about me. I wanted to change them so that I could finally become something he would accept.

This Pain Never Leaves

This was the worst day of my life. I had suffered for several years from debilitating pain in my hip following the birth of our child. We had already separated, and I went to the doctor to get an injection in my hip as a last effort before resorting to surgery. The injections (three of them) and the scraping away of the scar tissue that had built up on my hip was the most intense pain I had ever experienced. More painful than childbirth had been. After the procedure ended, and I tested standing on my leg, hoping the pain was finally gone, I was flooded with the realization of what the divorce really meant for the rest of my life. We had made so many plans for things we would do after my hip healed: hikes, vacations, camping trips, biking, family outings. All of those dreams, and so many more, had evaporated.

Gray Area

This poem weaves together Greek mythology and Christian teachings to explore my own growth during this period. The title ‘Gray Area’ describes my emergence from a black and white understanding of the world to a realization that there was much more gray area than I had imagined. It draws from the scripture in Matthew 18:9 “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.”

In this poem I pluck out my eyes, giving up my black and white worldview. The eyes are given in payment to Charon, the ferryman of the Acheron River (sometimes referred to as the river Styx), who ferries his passengers to the afterlife. Giving up my black and white thinking was the only way to preserve myself as my previous understanding of life collided with reality. My old self dies, and a new self is born.

Paper Doll

Trigger Warning Suicide Ideation

This poem is very personal and painful. The paper doll in this poem is a representation of my fragile hope. During the months leading up to my divorce and many many times afterward, I didn’t feel I could see a road forward. I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to keep going through this. I thought it would be easier to no longer exist. I had a short list of reasons why I needed to stay alive, but sometimes this list seemed too insignificant, a thing made of paper so easily torn. 

Blackberries

This poem is written in a numerical way. I love playing with different forms and styles in writing–constraints really bring out creative solutions.  The poem consists of nine stanzas. The first one has just one line with one syllable, the second has two lines with two syllables each, the third has three lines, etc. This number game really gives the poem a sense of building and multiplying which is essential to its theme.

Where I live in California, blackberries grow rampant and wild. They’re all over the coast and once they start growing, they will spread in every direction. There are a few things I love about blackberries–the more you pick from a particular plant, the more grow back next year. They are truly a source of abundance. But there’s a price for picking berries, which is pricked arms and hands because blackberries have many many thorns. They also have lovely white flowers and often have red leaves. White is a symbol of purity, but red is symbolic of passion, and I love those two contrasting ideas. In my poem I weave some of these themes of abundance and thorns together with imagery of brides and some biblical imagery of Eve’s fruit in the Garden to explore these ideas around blackberries.

Before my marriage, I was a very trusting person, and because of that I allowed myself to be taken advantage of, so this poem is a story of me learning “to grow thorns before berries,” to not give my trust away so easily. I also imagined this growing blackberry bush as the generational impact of my experience. Because of what I’ve been through, I will teach my daughter to be more careful than I was, and she will teach her daughter. Like the blackberry bush, difficulty and hardship forced me to grow thorns. The last line of the 8th stanza is my favorite: “Each year we grow back more wild.” The bush will keep growing larger and spreading its seeds further for each berry taken. In stealing the fruit, it only encourages the bush to grow and thrive.

The Cranes at the End of the Sky

This poem is about trying to find joy despite knowing I was in an impossible situation. The crane is a symbol of beauty and good fortune, and the speaker is chasing these cranes and the warm colors that paint them until she is stopped by her environment. The poem uses many physical aspects such as colors pushing up through pores, tangled feet, and sunset dripping from fingertips because the restraints I felt at the time were very physically present. It was one of my few poems that came to me nearly fully formed and I’ve made few edits to it from its original version.

The Sunflowers at the End of the Road

This poem is about an experience I had while traveling at the beginning of the marriage. We were moving across the country and had been driving through the plains in the middle of nowhere. It got late, and it was almost too dark to see anything with the dim lights of the old beater car. We pulled into a farmer’s field and pitched a tent to get a few hours rest. It was a miserable night: cold, loud bugs, our obnoxious dog jumping on the mattress until it popped. In the morning when I staggered out of the tent, I was stunned by the view. We were surrounded by sunflowers. They towered over me, and all I could see was blue sky and their yellow radiance. We had unknowingly camped in a field of sunflowers, and their emerging into their unexpected brilliance was a life-changing moment. It’s an experience I think about often when going through something difficult. I know eventually there will be sunflowers to surprise and lift me.,

I’d love to hear what you thought of my poems. Email me at camille@camillelongley.com! I read all my emails from readers!