I started writing poetry when I was fifteen or sixteen, during that shaky summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school. I wrote poetry for six months, then did not write any again for nearly two years. I can blame any number of reasons. Mostly, I blame a particular ex-boyfriend.

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I continued to write fiction, penning short stories in the margins of my history notes and English essays. In college, I was an English and Creative Writing major, leaning towards European literature. The first workshop I took as part of the creative writing requirements was a Memoir Writing class. However, my professor was, at heart, a poet. She encouraged us to play with language, to experiment with form and ideas. Though I had started writing poetry again the year before, the first day I wrote a poem in that class, it was like a dam had opened. I could not write enough. I could not keep up. The following semester, I took the Advanced Poetry workshop, followed by two semesters of fiction writing. Yet, through all of this, I still considered myself a fiction writer.

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These days? These days, I consider myself a poet first.

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I graduated from college five and half years ago. Next year, I'm coming up on my ten-year high school reunion. A year and half after I received my Baccalaureate, I had a breakdown. That's not a secret. I had been heading in that direction for almost a year prior to the final break. Somehow, through it all, still I wrote. I poured myself into two fiction pieces. I wrote poetry in my sleep.

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It's all hidden in the cache of remembered anxiety and depression and despair - that moment I felt the circuits switch in my head, that my words started to two step in my head and flow onto the page. That I started to think in poetry, and bleed haikus. It was the summer before I left the job which had dragged me down.

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When It Happened

I'm not sure when it happened; no.

That's not true.

I know when it happened.

I keep meaning to

choreograph words to Holst,

specifically Neptune.

I've always had this affinity

for water, despite keeping

both feet

on the ground.

My poetry echoes back;

moves in circles, signals to

what I've already written,

foreshadows what I will,

falls what neatly into spaces

in my brain

between the cracks,

trying to straddle a river

I don't dare yet swim

across.

I'll tell you when it happened,

when I switched

to meter without rhyme,

when I let go

of standard sentence structure

and made my words two-step

on the

page.

I was standing on the Commons; no.

I was in my apartment.

I saw a shooting star.

I watched them dismantle a stage.

I wrote.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Stefanie Maclin, Guest Blogger

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Stefanie Maclin's poetry and short fiction has appeared in several publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including Under the Radar, The Maynard, Doorknobs&Bodypaint, Astropoetica, Star*Line, The Linnett's Wings, Underground Voices, Battered Suitcase, and Poetica Publishing's Mizmor L'David Anthology: The Shoah. She has work forthcoming in Illumen, Ashe Journal, and Skive Magazine. She has recently completed her Master's degree in Library Science/Archives Management and is working on what she hopes will be her first full-length chapbook, a work she is tentatively titling Descent. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor