Staying Creative at Gate B9 | Margaret Haberman
On March 28th I flew from Portland, Maine to Monterey, California. By the time I arrived at my destination I’d been traveling for 18 hours. I had a lot of time to think about writing, and poetry. During my long day I mulled over how to stay creative—while navigating long lines, sitting in cramped seats, waiting for Group 5 to be called, walking through crowds of strangers in Portland, Charlotte, Phoenix, and Monterey. Not only can it be difficult to write in times of tedium, but also in times of upheaval and distress. For me, the past 18 months have challenged my ability to focus and write. At some point I decided I would settle for simple rather than grand. I write in my journal, occasionally write poems, more often write down notes, ideas for poems, phrases, snippets of conversations. It’s a lifelong habit of mine to make notes, but this time I’ve put some umph into it. It’s as if I am collecting stones that could become a wall, a walkway, a hearth. When I have enough stones, or a particularly good stone, that will be the beginning of something. So, on my journey to California, to the Pacific Ocean, I looked through those snippets and made some order out of them. It’s a kind of list poem, a list of beginnings, an assortment of stones.
Possible Beginnings, Compiled 3/28, Portland, Maine to Monterey
Evah said, To be normal is to be
in conspiracy against yourself.
This sorrow joining other sorrows.
It’s their old drama. Unskilled labor.
Time is a big word for these people,
some of them can’t even get out of bed.
The ice is coming off the roof.
Tall grasses on the power line after snow.
The children are beneath the rubble.
Evah said, No, you are not going to use AI
and extract all the water from the midwest
to help you with your wardrobe.
Maybe it’s enough, the fresh cheese carried
back by a stranger who walked down the trail
into the valley to the farm below us.
Every floor we had was hard.
It is not easy to find. Enter the front doors, down
the hallway on the right. Follow that. There’s a long
stretch. Go in and through.
I told Evah, I’m not going to be able
to fight my way through this.
We were not ready, and still it came.
Even the snow looks old today.
Mom said, Let’s start with the border pieces.
Evah said, To be normal,
is to be in conspiracy
against yourself.
On my to do list:
Love cures people.
Margaret Haberman lives and writes in Belfast, Maine. Her poems have been selected by Poems from Here, and appeared in the journals Spiritus, Island Journal, Kerning, and in the recent anthology Bearing Witness published by Sligo Creek. She is the co-author of a book of poems with Meg Weston titled To the Point and Back.
