Rebecca Meredith is a fourth-year candidate at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She has a master of arts degree in clinical psychology from Antioch University in Seattle. Meredith is in private practice seeing adult and child patients in psychodynamic psychotherapy and adult patients in psychoanalysis. Her poetry has been published in CALYX, Healing with Words, the Limbs of the Pine anthology, to name just a few, and she has had a chapbook published (Intergenerational Delta Blues by Pudding House Press, 2006) She has given poetry readings in such venues as radio KUOW's “The Beat” and was first runner-up in Seattle's 2007 Bart Baxter Performance Poetry competition. She is interested in the reparative nature of creativity, including play.
Meredith's poetry gives an intimate-feeling invitation into verses that tell a story practically from the front porch and encourage you to sit a spell with an idea wrapped warmly around your mind. Her words reveal a rich intertwining of her past and her cultural background. Best put in Meredith's own words, “…my relationship to the idea of ‘mother’ manifesting in my relationship to the culture in which I grew up (Mississippi Gulf coast and New Orleans) and in my observations of the female in people and things all around me.”
I remember the milking barn's smell on cool mornings,the hay and cow pies, the oil from the milking machines,and how the hose water ran in little guttersdown each side of the long walkwaybetween the broad middles and bony rumps.My Uncle Goose called them the Ladies, and treatedeach one as if it was their first date,excusing himself, begging forgivenessfor the antiseptic wash and the cool, sucking tubes.He needn't have bothered; the Ladies shifted and sighedlike a hundred splay-footed mothers, easing “Yes, child!”as the night's load lightened.And if they ever thought about the bulls and the calvesand the knackerman in the end, they didn't show it.The milking barn was hospital white, the radio onto the early morning farm report, where they were stars.Clover stretched just outside the door and over the hillto the blackwater creek.The day would be hot, and the live oaks on its bank cool,and tonight a tall and rangy man would blush once morebefore taking the milk they'd spent the day creating—giving it all they had.“Yes, child, yes!”
Down where you can buy anything, fish or fowl,off a truck parked on the side of the road,they put the new piranha in the swimming poolwhile the storm was taking the tank and the house and the yard.They told me so afterward, striking matches, drawing insalt-soaked tobacco, holding on awhile before letting go.They told me how the bottle trees moanedthe way women do when they tear their hair, thenhow wine bottles, coke bottles, medicine bottles flewlike they'd been jilted-lover-flung, they told mehow sea turtles swam past City Hall; how dogs drowned.A storm will do things, they said, a man wishes he could do.A storm will preach a sermon, break your enemy,piss seawater on the bushes, dam up the rivers with pleasure boats,make an El Dorado swim down a dirt road on its back.You got to love a storm like that just a little, between the sobs.About those man-eating fish, they said,
Sheri Butler Hunt, M.D., is a graduate analyst in the adult and child divisions at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. A published poet and member of TAP's editorial board, she welcomes reader's comments and suggestions at .