Poetry & Alligators: To MJ

This is an epistolary shout-out to my friend on a special day with some poetry analysis!

Dear

MJ

,

It’s midnight on the east coast, which means it’s now a special day. Are you up? You probably are and reading a book (not this). But no matter!

Whenever you do get this missive, would you mind grabbing your copy of A History of Half-Birds by Caroline Harper New? I’m about to give you another Caroline Harper New poetry-inspired poetry present this week!

I found a cool pattern in the poetry. I squirreled it away a while ago, waiting to package it up for you somehow. I thought, Why not in a Substack? (So, here we are.) I hope you enjoy this little, unconventional present.

The pattern I found is significant for three reasons:

1. It connects two of our favorite poems: Widdershins and If We Stage The Wizard of Oz With Alligators.

2. Best of all, it’s weird.

3. True to this collection’s overall spirit, the pattern is a little witchy!

💕 - Sara

P.S. To everyone else reading, I’m a little sorry for publishing in such a PDA fashion, but truth be told,

MJ

is one of the friends/readers I write to when I write most of my Substacks. So, unbeknownst to you, I’ve kind of been writing to her all along! I’m just being direct about it right now because it’s a special day, and

MJ

, who especially loves talking about books, surprised me with this AMAZING collection last year, and there’s so much to talk about from its pages. So, please get a copy, and join us!

---

Alligators, Widdershins, and Tender Skin

Shared imagery turns four poems into an informal, tightly knit series.

The poems:

• Widdershins¹

• If We Stage The Wizard of Oz With Alligators,²

• Moon Song for My Mother,³

• and The Women of Weeki Wachi.⁴

👆🏻Alligator imagery threads them all together.👇🏻

Let’s go in order, starting with Widdershins, the collection’s second poem. Its speaker writes from the dentist’s chair (literally mouth agape, dentist probing around). Her thoughts wander. Eventually, her mind touches down in the toothsome territory of Florida alligators:

“How the alligator split from the flamingo / by accident. There is no reason / to think dinosaurs weren’t also soft and pink says the paleontologist. […]

In the other poems, alligators show up in varied ways:

• as stage actors (If We Stage The Wizard of Oz With Alligators);

• as the figures in a mother’s nightmares (Moon Song for My Mother);

• as job hazards for the actresses performing as mermaids in a Florida state park (The Women of Weeki Wachi).

Three other features unite the poems in this series:

1. Nearby any alligator mention, there is some tender, vulnerable skin.

Right after alligators come up, a paleontologist in Widdershins teases with the hypothesis that dinosaurs could have had “soft and pink” skin. At the end of the poem, the speaker also calls attention to the dentist’s “small pink hands” (which are, yikes, poised in her own snappable jaws).

In If We Stage The Wizard of Oz With Alligators, “the Wizard, a man— / with a human hand—” is “Circled by gators and Dorothy / with twice the teeth.”

Moon Song for My Mother has this line: “After each foot surgery she woke screaming of alligators / who wouldn’t let go / of her pinky toe.”

The Women of Weeki Wachi, a poem about the Weeki Wachi Mermaid Shows, explains that the actresses “make hand signals [that] warn / of alligators.”

2. There are professional Subject Matter Experts in each poem in the series.

A paleontologist & dentist in Widdershins; ➡️ The herpetologist in If We Stage The Wizard of Oz With Alligators; ➡️ The scientists studying whale sounds in Moon Song for My Mother; ➡️ The actresses in The Women of Weeki Wachi.

3. The Surreal Physics of Being Lost, Wandering in Circles ties them all together too.

In Widdershins, the speaker points out how human beings tend to walk in counterclockwise circles when lost in the wilderness.

“There is no reason / to wish ourselves extinct, yet if left to instinct, humans / walk circles counterclockwise / […] widdershins.”

Dorothy’s storyline of getting lost and trying to get back to Kansas is fully present in If We Stage The Wizard of Oz With Alligators. Plus, we learn in the poem that alligators have terrible “homing instincts” if they go farther than 60 miles from their home waters. (I had no idea!) There’s also circular, widdershin-esque imagery: the poem opens with the tornado the plucks Dorothy out of Kansas, and the poem ends with alligators predatorily circling the Wizard.

In Moon Song for My Mother, the speaker’s mother is just out of surgery taking pain medicine that affects her sleep and memory. She’s lost in her own medicated mind. There are times in the middle of the night where her mother is awake and disconnected from reality: “I know she won’t remember anything I say, so I say / the alligators have gone to sleep.”

Finally, the actresses in The Women of Weeki Wachi are likened to “—real life sirens / but for the silence.” No one is actually lost in this poem, but the siren reference invokes the Greek mythology of men on ships getting lost at sea, lured by the siren’s song.

The Point?

First, fear. This collection engages with a very specific types of death or threat to life, well-known in Florida. The kind where people disappear or die in water. Hurricanes. Drowning. Domesticated animals lost during a flood. Planes lost at sea. Alligator attacks….

Also, we watch the speaker observe slow (like, evolutionary scale) changes from a retrospective position and voice the links between disparate things throughout this collection. Isn’t it lovely, in this context, to notice how four poems evolved together with some of the same DNA: alligators, tender skin, and widdershins? I don’t really know if these four poems I’ve written about are supposed to be read in series, but like a paleontologist digging for bones or someone studying the biological patterns in evolutionary history, there are connections to be made and noted. The poems might be very different, but they are irrefutably linked—just as birds and dinosaurs are in our world.⁵

1. Part I: Widdershins, page 4

2. Part III: Hypothetical Moons, page 36

3. Part II: Parlor Tricks, page 36

4. Part III: Hypothetical Moons, page 52

5. I’d love to ask Caroline Harper New, if I ever had the chance!