Andrea Scott reads “Saucer Magnolia”

I marked my lost pregnancy and my last one, all in one shot.

Out front I planted a sapling—magenta saucer magnolia—and, beside the root ball, the 
living baby’s placenta. The midwife said her husband wanted it out of their freezer, 
and sooner than later.

My preteens played “For Our Fathers” on the fiddle. They hadn’t yet learned a tune about 
mothers or babies. A neighbour leaned out her window for the free concert. I didn’t make 
eye contact. She retreated when I stooped to empty the meaty contents of the bag into 
the earth.

I thought the magnolia would be the next best thing to having fresh tulips in a vase for 
weeks on end at the bitter end of winter. Cupped, waxy hands ready to catch whatever 
fell from the sky. Grief, goodness, persistent rain.

I wanted to ask the midwife if I could call my back-to-back pregnancies a Super 
Pregnancy, add up all the weeks of growth, plus the small terrible break, into 
something that rivalled the gestation of a dolphin or a horse. The midwife was busy.

The placenta is a superb thing. Was this one mine or my boy’s? Ours? I thought it would 
be offering enough for the tree to thrive.

A friend had her placenta fried up with shallots and she glowed, but it sounded too 
savoury, too animal for me. Chronically low on iron, I now know it would have been just 
the right amount of animal.

I was too busy nursing the boy to water the tree. It withered and the neighbour tsked. 
She didn’t note my boy’s impressive growth.

Her beloved vinca crept under the fence in my direction. The vine, she said, was part of 
her heritage. When I pulled out the dead magnolia, the vinca moved right in.

I consider what it is to miscarry. To wrongly carry. To have designs come to naught.

Sometimes my boy asks about the baby who didn’t make it. A ghost of a playmate. 
He’s alive because that baby is not. It’s part of his heritage. 

Out front, it's all purple stars on a quilt of emerald green. The vinca, it turns out, is 
perfect: blooms all summer. Only stops for frost.

Kevin Matthews on “Saucer Magnolia”

Life’s most intense passages hint at depth of meaning that invites but usually thwarts articulation. Terribly heaviness slips nonetheless through our fingers. The elegance here is a deliberate, clear voice in natural, speechlike stanzas, within careful attention to structure. It presents a speaker simply too occupied caring for the living to shoehorn meaning into the ineffable loss. Lives are exigent; a poet and mother must express economically, accept, and move forward.

Bios

Andrea Scott

Andrea Scott’s poetry has appeared in various literary journals and public projects. Scott won the 2024 CV2 Foster Poetry Prize, and the 2022 Geist Erasure Poetry Contest. Scott’s first chapbook, In the Warm Shallows of What Remains, won the 2024 Raven Chapbooks Poetry Contest. She lives in Victoria, BC.