Field Girl
by Sara Backer
Field.
Girl.
Barn.
Girl.
Hay.
Sunlight between boards.
Girl.
Where are the kittens?
Girl.
Door.
Man.
Oh, no, not the man.
Run, girl!
But she wants to find the kittens.
His hand.
Her hair.
Suddenly, she is three girls thinking.
Don’t touch my hair!
Why is he touching my hair?
Maybe I’m supposed to let him touch my hair.
It’s just hair.
She says nothing.
But it isn’t nothing
and she will not speak for a long time.
Sara Backer’s first book of poetry, Such Luck (Flowstone Press 2019) follows two poetry chapbooks: Scavenger Hunt (dancing girl press) and Bicycle Lotus (Left Fork), which won the Turtle Island Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in the Merrimack River watershed with white pines, red oaks, and black bears.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Field Girl”? This poem was drafted in my mind one night at 4:30 AM. I was too stressed to sleep, thinking about fire and virus and politics. I thought about how ye olde childhood trauma primes the brain to accept more trauma, and I thought about nouns. Could I write a poem with nouns? I didn’t want to get out of bed so I memorized lines to remember them and when I finally typed it up, I liked the way repeated words mirrored the way the mind jumps around fitting pieces together. How something small turns into a life-shaping event by Sara Backer Towels don’t dry. Swollen doors can’t shut. The house collects swelter—92 degrees inside. Half asleep at night, I hear a man and woman talking in the basement. Intruders! No, intruders wouldn’t chat for fear I’d call police. Am I hallucinating? I shut off the air conditioner—the voices stop. I turn it back on and a radio chat show reaches the edge of my hearing. Listening harder changes the conversation into Gregorian chant. As I start to find a rhythm, it becomes—sort of—the radio hit played nonstop through my freshman year in college. I return to a sultry August night with dancing in the quad between four dorms, me watching from the window of my room. Everyone cheers when the song begins, as if “late December back in ’63, what a very special time for me” had meaning for eighteen-year-olds who were pre-schoolers then. Giddy with my brand new independence, I wonder if one of the boys in the quad might become my first boyfriend. I calculate odds: about 150 of the about 250 are male and if a match requires a 1%, there’d be a boy for me. I put on mascara and a halter top, but I’m too shy to go downstairs and join them. The mirror shows me who I am: the girl who analyzes from afar. What happened to the music? The sneaky air conditioner shifted to fan mode, rumbling like a motor. Sara Backer, an MFA candidate at Vermont College of Fine arts, has published two poetry chapbooks: Scavenger Hunt (dancing girl press) and Bicycle Lotus (Left Fork) which won the Turtle Island Poetry Award. Recent and upcoming online publications include Unbroken, Amaryllis, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Web site: sarabacker.com What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Oh, What a Night”? When I started hearing voices coming from my air conditioner, I feared I was going crazy. I went online and was relieved to learn that was a common hallucination usually caused by fatigue. The motor noise is irregular enough for our sleep-deprived brains to interpret as voices or music. I cautiously brought up this topic with friends and was surprised to learn that they, too, had heard the AC speak to them! Never quite clear enough to nail down the words, but a very convincing radio substitute. I drafted “Oh, What a Night” under the influence of exhaustion. Unable to put up my usual critical filters, I followed my associations and landed on an August night years ago with similar weather. Barely 18 years old, self-conscious and shy, I couldn’t bring myself to join the dancing. Instead, I took refuge in analyzing the situation. As with most dreams, mine faded at the epiphany. The AC motor, which had become a musical time travel machine, went back to being a motor. The love a young child Two street lamps We step inside, Sara Backer, author of the novel American Fuji, has been honored with Djerassi and Norton Island Artist Residencies. In the past year, her writing has been published in Blueline, Ellipsis, The Pedestal, Gargoyle, Clockhouse Review, Cream City Review, and as a featured poet in Conclave: A Journal of Character. For more information, links to online work, and a cool slide show of Japan, visit her web site at http://www.sarabacker.com. I so love the ending to this piece. Can you describe how you arrived at that ending? I wrote this poem in a Duluth dormitory where I was staying for a workshop led by Ted Kooser. The view from my window looked down on the parking lot. One night, I noticed the shadow between two cars formed an elipse with pointy ends. I took on the challenge of trying to describe that. I failed. The other poets didn’t understand how the shadow worked. I kept bringing drafts into workshop until I overheard one poet comment to another: “I’m so sick of shadows.” Hurt, I found myself missing my partner, whom I knew would immediately get my canoe metaphor. Then, I flashed on what I was really writing about: not an interesting shadow, but the magic of finding someone who understands your imagination. As a fan of Charles Simic, I wanted to make a wild surreal leap without rumination. I wanted my final image to contrast with artificial lighting and asphalt, to reveal an alchemy that defies all odds—something wondrously alive.Oh, What a Night
Peaches
by Sara Backer
unthinkingly gives
her father (more…)When Soul Mates Meet
by Sara Backer
light the parking lot
from opposite
directions.
The lot has emptied
down to your car and mine.
On the asphalt between them,
twin shadows overlap
and form a darker umbra
in the exact shape
of a canoe.
startling the fish.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
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Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
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