The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by Maggie Smith

But what does that mean exactly? I’m a poet, my arms are covered with tattoos, my nose is pierced, and I like my music constant and fairly loud? It’s not like all of the other neighborhood moms look and behave like Donna Reed, but I get their point.

My kids sometimes joke with me that I’m not like the other moms. Physically I feel just right for my age, but mentally I suppose I might feel a little younger? It’s sort of like height: I think of myself as being taller than I actually am (I always go to the back row in group shots before being kindly shuffled back to the front), and I probably see myself as being just a few years younger than I actually am, too. But here we are.ĭo you feel old for your age? Young for your age? Just right? Are you in step with your peers? Growing up, and even pre-divorce, I never saw myself being a single parent at 46. How are my younger sisters in their forties, too? What happened? It makes me wonder-do other people experience that, too? When I imagined growing older and raising my kids, I pictured myself married, and in my mind’s eye we’d be doing all of this together. I suppose this is a roundabout way of saying that my age only catches me off guard when I think of myself in relation to other people in my family. On the other hand, it seems impossible that I’m 46 and my parents are in their 70s I still think of my parents as being in their 50s, though I don’t at all feel twenty years younger myself. Is there another age you associate with yourself in your mind? If so, what is it? And why, do you think? She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, and more.

A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change.

The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by Maggie Smith