I Return to the River

On July 3rd, I received my contributor copy of Shō Poetry Journal’s Summer 2025 issue. My poem, "While playing two hours of Chutes and Ladders I contemplate the futility of life” is included among its pages.

On July 4th, I woke up to the news that the Guadalupe River had flooded its banks and so many people, so many children, had drowned.

The river in this poem is the Guadalupe River. It is the river in all of my poems that feature a river. The only river I write about. The river I return to in my mind, and my writing, again and again.

I spend a lot of time thinking about drowning. Too much really for a person who doesn’t have that many occasions to actually be in water. Drowning is the primary feature of my recurring nightmares. It is the way I describe even the smallest sense of being overwhelmed.

“You get easily flooded,” a therapist once told me when I explained how quickly I feel like I can’t breathe when too many people are demanding too many things of me all at once. Yes, flooded. I am easily flooded. It all comes back to being flooded. To standing on the back deck of my childhood home watching the river race past, the flood water having risen way up over both retaining walls, rushing by so close we could have reached out to touch it. Could have been swept away.

I have spent the summer with my head just barely above water. There is so much work to get done—book manuscript reading for a contest I was asked to judge, chapbook manuscript reading for a local small press, blurb requests and marketing copy and other preparations for when my book comes out next year, one issue of the magazine I publish is in production while another is getting ready to open for submissions and I’ve added a bunch of new people to the team—and none of it is the novel draft that is pounding away in the back of my mind, desperate for my attention. The problem with a job that offers little to no financial gain is that you repeatedly find yourself butting up against the question of “is any of this worth it?” and then you have to ask yourself what “worth” means and how you want to measure it and how much you want to fight back against society’s limited definitions, and really aren’t you lucky to be doing this thing you love, but isn’t it also true that the drudgery parts of it are still drudgery, and there’s simply not enough quiet time and brain space for the parts that rely entirely on quiet time and brain space, and so on and so forth until it feels like you’re drowning.

I keep going back and forth in my mind about whether or not I should really throw myself into the effort of getting my book into people’s hands. It’s a lot of work to promote a book—is it really worth it for a poetry collection from a small publisher? Probably not. But I have talked to a few friends about setting up reading events where I team up with other artists—musicians, or dancers, or fellow writers—and use the excuse of my book to create a few small pockets of creative pleasure in the year ahead. “Fuck it,” I think, “let’s sing and dance and read poetry and not worry so much about what in this life is ‘worth’ doing.”

I am ready for school to start, and for this period of intense, time-consuming and intensely-focused work to come to an end. I’ve got about a month to go before things will ease up and I’ll start to feel like I can breathe a little easier again. I am looking forward to finding a bit of time to get back to actually writing.

In my non-working hours, my summer has mostly consisted of eating popsicles and taking my kids to the pool. My two-year-old has taken to the water like a fish, at times to the point of pushing himself out of my arms and attempting to set off on his own, not realizing that he doesn’t know how to swim. I’ve told him that he has to hold on to me, or the wall, or his turquoise-colored noodle, otherwise he will go underwater and could drown, and he says yes like he acknowledges the risk until the next time his big brother goes swimming past and he tries to set out after him. The other day, he dipped his face under the surface and came up sputtering, breathing hard out of his nose in an intentional, determined way to get all of the water out.

“Are you okay?” I asked him and he nodded.

“I’m okay. I’m not drowning,” he said.

“You’re not drowning,” I agreed.

He scrunched up his face and again blew really hard out of his nose. “You’re not drowning,” he echoed me.

“That’s right,” I told him. “We’re not drowning.”

You can find more of my writing & contact information at clairemtaylor.com. If you’d like to further support my work, please consider purchasing one of my books, or a copy of Little Thoughts Press. I also have a ko-fi page.