Who Am I To Complain

It’s been a while, and a lot has happened since I sent out my last newsletter at the end of February. So here’s a quick catch-up.

My book came out and lots of lovely people have said very kind things to me about it. I got to read to a wonderful crowd of friends and family, and a few people I didn’t know at my book launch party in March and it was amazing.

Then I got to read to another wonderful crowd of friends and family, and a few people I didn’t know at Booksweet in Ann Arbor. Plus I got to meet and share the evening with Mitch Nobis, whose book is fantastic and you should absolutely read it.

I will be reading at My Dead Aunt’s Books in Hyattsville, MD, on June 14th. I’ll be up in Woodstock, NY, on June 27th and 28th to celebrate my friend Jude who is bringing back her Mother Nature dance performance for a new audience and I may do a little reading from the new book during the show’s intermission. And I will be at Snowfort Books in Westport, NY, on July 1st, which is my publisher’s bookstore and I am so pumped to check it out.

If you can’t make it to any of these but want to hear me read a few poems from the book, the NAWP online reading I did back in February is now up on YouTube. I’ve got this video set to start at my portion of the reading, but if you have the time and inclination, I recommend starting from the beginning to hear all three featured poets.

Lastly, for now, Bardball featured one of the baseball poems from my book and will have a short interview about my book, baseball, and the intersection of the two in their Substack this weekend. And I also answered a bunch of interesting questions about writing for rob mclennan’s blog (plus one question where I talked about how my house smelled like poop).

Good news, the lilac has bloomed and it smells wonderful. When the wind blows, the fragrance is carried across our whole yard.

I think that’s all my writing updates for now. As always, thank you for reading and for all your support.

Who Am I To Complain

Our yard is full of clover and grass grown wild. The tulips in my garden have bloomed and wilted. The irises are coming. The lilac bush is a festival for bumblebees. Everything is so lovely—lush and verdant and bursting with life—but I am in a terrible mood. Call it PMS or perimenopause. Call it The State of the World.

When Donald Trump said, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” I took my newly-three-year-old outside to dig in the dirt. I cut back the dried stalks of the zebra grass while he dug a hole with a small shovel and a big toy truck and buried his cars beneath a pile of earth. “Let’s not forget about those cars,” I warned, my heart racing from the image of a frantic nighttime search for a lost Mater tow truck—we can’t do bedtime without him.

I am trying to find stillness, calm, but lately, these have eluded me.

I love this time of year but it’s also too much, you know? Everything so bright and vibrant. The greens too green. The Kawazu cherry blossoms too pink. Even the lilac, too fragrant. The world constantly buzzing like bees. Life is so beautiful and so painfully fucking stupid. Every day is a tug-o-war between the delight of some surprising insight from my beautiful, inspiring children, and the horror of some insane declaration from this group of moronic shitheads we put in charge of leading the world. Show me the beauty of Earth floating in space as you sail past the moon, and then show me the dismantling of the US Forest Service so that we can more easily burn this place to the ground.

“Quit jerking me around!” I want to scream at the universe. I want to scream all the time these days.

It is 90 degrees this week and my dresser is still full of sweaters. I should root through our closets, pull out my shorts, but on Monday, when I turn 41, it will be in the 50s again, so what’s the point?

When I turned 39, I wrote this poem that would eventually become the opener of my book. (If you want to read the poem I wrote when I turned 40, you’ll have to buy the book.) It was April 2024.

On Monday, I am taking myself clothes shopping for my birthday because my fortysomething body can’t decide what kind of body it wants to be. Everything I own is torn or stained or just very uncomfortable. Last week I started a new project and it’s the first time I’ve written anything substantial in over six months. It was a much-needed exhale. At some point next week, I will make time to write another birthday poem, because I found that particular practice to be a surprisingly enjoyable way of marking time and I’m curious to see what comes from reflecting on turning 41, which is unequivocally a boring, unremarkable age. If it doesn’t rain, maybe I’ll do a little more work in the garden, finish bagging up all the dead, pruned branches from the rose bushes. We cut the roses way back this year because they had grown too top heavy and were no longer blooming as densely as they should. In March, when my husband chopped the bushes to half their height, we crossed our fingers and said, hope we didn’t just fuck these up completely.

They are growing beautifully so far this spring.

The thorny limbs have sat in a large pile in our yard and we’ve slowly broken them into smaller pieces and bagged them up. It’s an obnoxious, tedious task and I can only stand to do a little bit at a time because it’s a guarantee I’ll come away scraped and throbbing from being poked by thorns.

Maybe I’ll set my phone aside for the whole day. Avoid the news. Give myself the gift of pretending the rest of the world and all its hateful stupidity doesn’t exist for a while.

Maybe I’ll lie down in our overgrown grass and close my eyes against the flourishing beauty of spring, let my son bury me in dirt, cover me in earth, hide me away like his cars. Come evening, the sun melting across the sky, one year of my life closing, a new one beginning, I’ll hear my family searching for me, their voices muffled and faraway. “Where is Mommy? Where is she? We can’t do bedtime without her.”

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.