Fran Schumer
Ars Poetica

I
Last week, I applied for a poetry fellowship. The application was due in three days. I wrote it quickly and sent it in. Then I forgot about it. I forgot about the whole thing.

II
A few days later, I received an email. Congratulations. You have won a second place fellowship to attend the so and so writers conference..…
I was thrilled. After the initial high, I checked the agenda. Because of Covid, the workshops would be virtual. Zoom workshops in the morning; zoom workshops in the afternoon; zoom workshops in the evening. Zoom, zoom, zoom. Zooms loomed over me. How would I zzzzz (sleep), another problem. Also, what about all I had to do at home: shop; cook; clean; work; visit my elderly parents, and just things I enjoy, like riding my bike?

III
That night I dreamed I was at a walk-in clinic. The nurse held out a stick. The thin, liquid line was blue.
I was pregnant.
I wanted an abortion.
I called my uncle, the head of OBGYN at a major New York hospital.
This certainly was a dream because my uncle had been dead for 30 years and fifteen years earlier, I’d had my ovaries removed.

IV
When I was young, I felt frightened. A cousin’s I.Q. was twenty points higher than mine, he told me. How could I compete?
I was a girl. I had other ways of getting noticed.
I became perfect.
I studied perfectly.
I sat in perfectly uncomfortable positions like Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man.
I solved quadratic equations perfectly, which, according to my own accounting system, made me a perfect human being, a superhuman.
I read in Nietzsche that a man could become a superman by murdering someone, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment did. If you wanted to become a superwoman, you would starve.
I ate half a cottage cheese sandwich a day.
I lost my period.
I lost some of my hair. At college one night, I left my eyebrows in a pile at the library.

IV
When I woke from my dream, I understood its meaning at once. I didn’t want to go to the poetry conference. I did not want to give birth to this new baby, poetry. I did not want to push and writhe and agonize. I did not want to produce, create, live large. It was all the old anorexic crap: “A Lesser Life,” the title of a book I once read called it.

V
Soon, I fell back into a light sleep. In my half-waking state, I imagined myself dialing an 800 number (or was it 911)?
I wanted to register a poem. (How do you register a poem?)
No one answered.
A taped message then said  “Your call is important to us.”
But when I got up to scribble down some notes so that I would remember this dream, I
wrote:
Your poem is important to us.