At last I was convinced that giving in to their thinking represented a huge error in the evolution of my family affairs. Riven with a savage melancholy, not permitted out of the house without two minders—one armed with needle sedative, the other armed with arms—I armed myself with myself and threw off the vulgar superstition and reactionary domination that had up to then poisoned my mental library, imprisoning me, making me believe, with them, that I must have children when I knew that I must not, would not. And I did not.
Source: Poetry (January 2012).
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE
This poem originally appeared in the January 2012 issue of Poetry magazine
Journalist, essayist, and editor (of the Milford, New Hampshire, weekly newspaper Cabinet), Kathryn Starbuck started writing poems in her 60s. Her first collection, Griefmania, was published in 2006. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Best American Poetry 2008.
Though she was a practiced prose writer, it was the experience of grief that led her to writing poetry. After the deaths of her . . .
Continue reading this biography
Poems by Kathryn Starbuck