Michelle Diaz – Poetry Non-Stop

We welcome back Michelle Diaz with a poem that looks at superstition for today’s NaPoWriMo prompt.

Poetry Non-Stop · NaPoWriMo Day 26: Michelle Diaz – Superstition

Superstitions and magical thinking

Do you have any beliefs that stop you doing certain things? Do you believe in good/bad luck?Perhaps you have childhood memories of things you were told not to do because of superstitious beliefs e.g putting up an umbrella in the house, walking under a ladder, breaking a mirror etc. Explore these strange ideas. Perhaps you could become a broken mirror and write from its viewpoint, perhaps something bad did happen because you believed it would.
What is the strangest superstition you have ever heard of? Perhaps you could make up a new modern set of superstitions and turn their oddities into a poem.

Mummy and the Night Sky

Those aren’t stars love,
they are constellations of diseases

look, there’s polio
caused by unwashed strawberries

and over there
the one that looks like a bear
that’s diabetes

the big one is cancer –
you’ll be more prone

if you bring daisies into the house
or wear a balaclava on Tuesday.

Michelle Diaz

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Today we welcome Michelle Diaz with a prompt that could take you down many roads.

Poetry Non-Stop · NaPoWriMo Day Nine: Michelle Diaz – Journeys

Journeys

This could be a literal journey, or the journey of having a child, or birthing a new project.
How does it feel? What are your fears? Use the poem to explore your feelings around success
and failure, the joy of a journey. What’s more important, the outcome or how you got there.

A Birth Journey in Nine Movements

We are en route to Yorkshire,
I stir my latte with a pregnancy test,
it shows up positive,
all the waiters do the Macarena.
My mother finds a Clear Blue box in the fridge –
it is full of eggs.
We have omelette for tea.
The family has never been so together.

I am carried around by four angels
who guard my apple pip cargo,
pump me full of oxytocin,
airbrush the stretch marks.

My body wages war on vegetables,
organic and tinge of green are off the menu.
I am possessed by the Honey Monster,
only pear drops and Jelly Tots will do.

Three weeks to go and somebody has let the bathwater out –
oligohydramnios – the midwife tells me you’re shrinking.
The sofa becomes a wet grave I bury myself in.

The hospital – I have a bed with a bell,
Mr Doc says emergency caesarean.
We float round the room like balloons in denial.

Seven days go by – you are still not out,
despite Doctor Patel’s insistence,
despite the letter on serious yellow paper,
despite my dangerously high blood pressure.
I sense we are dying. I am probed silence.
You have been leaked information.
You are not coming.

C-section. They find you. I become Mummy.

The room breathes morphine, the women sweat.
I am in Tenko. The nurse has a moustache.
She withholds pain relief, wheels away precious baby.
A cold star rises above the saline drip,
guards the broken nativity.

My old skin lines the corridor,
the curt nurse picks it up.
Strangely, I cry because you are no longer inside.
Your dad closes the curtain in case they think I am depressed.
I’m not. It’s just that I will never again know such intimacy.

A Birth Journey in Nine Movements’ (published by ‘Under the Radar’ in 2018 and ‘Against the
Grain’ in 2019 in my pamphlet ‘The Dancing Boy’)

Michelle Diaz has been published by Under the Radar, Poetry Wales and numerous poetry publications both online and in print. Her debut pamphlet ‘The Dancing Boy’ was published by Against the Grain Poetry Press in 2019. She is currently working on her first full collection.

If you’ve enjoyed this podcast please consider showing your support with a donation via ko-fi.com

Books by many of the poets featured on the podcast are available from the Poetry Non-Stop bookshop here. All books purchased via this link help to raise money to keep this podcast going.