Tag Archives: Susan McLean

Susan McLean, ‘The Other Woman’

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What makes you think your husband’s what I want?
Does he think that? He’s dumb as mud, if so.
To me, a man’s a fast-food restaurant,
just grab and go. Maybe that hurts to know,
but joints like that are everywhere—and packed.
It’s not a lifetime contract; it’s a meal.
I don’t do long-term. Obstinates attract.
I’m bad for him. He knows. Big fucking deal.

Nobody has a long attention span
these days. So, what do you do when you’re bored?
Binge-watch TV, drink white wine, find a man?
You want security, but feel ignored
and miss that fizz of come what may. Guess what:
we all end up alone. You think you’re not?

*****

Susan McLean writes: “This poem got its start as an entry to a sonnet contest held by the online journal Better Than Starbucks in 2019. It won the contest, appeared in the journal, and was later reprinted in Extreme Sonnets II. I like the dramatic monologue form, and once I thought of the situation, an “other woman” being confronted by the outraged wife of the man she has slept with, the voice of a woman with an attitude just came to me.

“Ironically, the poem’s content was influenced by my experience of teaching students to write essays in a college composition class. One of the subjects I typically had them write about was the obesity epidemic in America, what was causing it, and how the situation might be improved. I was surprised to learn that my students were often angry on being told that fast food might be hurting them. Many of them had been raised on it, loved it, and depended on it because it was what they could afford. They did not want to be informed of how many calories it contained or what it might be doing to their health. But the other influence on the poem was my sympathy for anyone trying to start a relationship in an era of short attention spans, instant gratification, and online dating sites. There’s a lot of loneliness out there, and not just among single people.

“Finally, for me what makes this sonnet work is the underlying humor in what is a very uncomfortable situation. The wife, who initiates the confrontation, seems to want the other woman to back off, but finds that the woman has no particular interest in the husband, and that the husband is only pursuing her because she is not interested in him. The wife is further thrown off balance when the other woman suggests that the two women have more in common than the wife may want to believe. When a clichéd situation doesn’t turn out the way you expect it to, the element of surprise contributes to the humor.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “The Other Woman” by Professor Bop is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Using form: Triolet: Susan McLean, ‘Negative Capability’

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Succeeding as a poet means you know
you’re nobody. Writing your name in water,
you dissipate, dissolving in the flow.
Succeeding as a poet means you know
you’re planting rows of seedlings in the snow.
Not truth but mere oblivion is Time’s daughter.
Succeeding as a poet means you know.
You’re nobody, writing your name in water.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “This triolet, originally published in Snakeskin, is a tribute to two poets who died almost completely unknown, but who are now considered to be among the greatest poets of the English language: John Keats and Emily Dickinson. When Keats died at the age of 25, he asked that nothing be written on his gravestone except “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.” His friends disobeyed his instructions, adding the information “This Grave / contains all that was Mortal, / of a / YOUNG ENGLISH POET, / Who, / on his Death Bed, / in the Bitterness of his Heart, / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, / Desired / these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone / Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water / Feb 24th 1821.” They did not include his name. Keats’s letters later made famous his phrase “negative capability,” which he defined as “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

Emily Dickinson wrote at least 1775 poems, though only ten were published in her lifetime. Her poem now known as 288 (because she did not title her poems) reads:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Both Dickinson and Keats are now very famous. But it could easily have been otherwise. Sir Francis Bacon once wrote “Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.” I wish I could believe that a poet’s true value will always be revealed in time. What I know instead is that all poets’ works will be forgotten in time. Succeeding as a poet means that you go on writing anyway, whether or not your writing will ever be appreciated, even if you feel quite certain that it won’t. To lose yourself in the moment of creation is reward enough.“

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “Seven bathtubs and a man who writes on water.” by jpmm is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Using form: Triolet: Susan McLean, ‘In Arcadia’

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We hadn’t pictured paradise
with vultures circling overhead.
Edenic lushness has a price
we hadn’t pictured. Paradise
seems changeless, but its clock’s precise.
“It’s feeding time,” the watchers said.
We hadn’t pictured paradise
with vultures, circling overhead.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “This triolet was inspired partly by the Latin phrase “Et in Arcadia ego” (which means “I too [am or was] in Arcadia”), partly by the famous Nicolas Poussin painting in which that phrase appears on a tombstone surrounded by gawking Arcadian shepherds, and partly by a family trip to Florida at Christmas, to celebrate my parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary. Arcadia, a region in Greece, was made famous by Vergil in his Eclogues as an idyllic rural land mainly populated by shepherds. “Arcadia” thus came to be associated with a relaxed bucolic paradise. Yet the Latin phrase reminds us that no earthly location is immune to death.

“In contemporary America, one of the locations associated with tropical warmth and pleasant leisure is Florida, where many Americans from more northerly locales go to vacation or retire. While my family was staying at a rented home near Sarasota Bay, on the highway we often passed signs for Arcadia, Florida, which was not far away. The weather and the natural beauty of Sarasota came up to our expectations, but we did not foresee that every time we went outside we would see vultures circling overhead. Given our parents’ ages, the vultures were a poignant reminder of mortality.

“A triolet is one of the shorter French repeating forms. One of the challenges it presents is how to vary the repeated lines so that they do not become boring, usually done by adding slight changes to the punctuation of those lines. This poem originally appeared in Able Muse and later in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “Road Trip Santa Clara to Camajuani via Central Road of Cuba (banda Placetas) passing through La Movida, Pelo Malo, Manajanabo, Miller town and Falcon city. Villa Clara province, Cuba, November 2023” by lezumbalaberenjena is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Using form: Iambic trimeter: Susan McLean, ‘Danse Macabre’

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The dancers, taut as bows,
burn in their joyous fire.
They whirl, entwine, and pose
in friezes of desire.

No skeletons appear
to shock the celebration.
The dancers, bowing, hear
a rapturous ovation.

Outside, the wind blows colder.
Although she’d rather linger,
she senses on her shoulder
the tap of a light finger.

And, though she came alone
and doesn’t need a ride,
a shadow, thin as bone,
attends her, stride for stride,

then leaves her, still denied.
But the end is not in doubt.
The skeleton inside
eventually wants out.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “I wrote this poem after attending a performance of Ailey II, the junior corps of dancers in the company founded by Alvin Ailey. It was on a cold night in autumn around Halloween, and even though there was nothing sinister about the dances I witnessed, I was reminded of the medieval Dance of Death, in which skeletons appear to people in the midst of their daily routine to summon them away to death. One of the most memorable images of that theme occurs at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, and I have seen it portrayed also on the wooden bridge in Lucerne in Switzerland. The poem is written in three-beat lines of iambic trimeter, which reminded me of a stately waltz.”

‘Danse Macabre’ originally appeared in THINK Magazine.

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

“la danse macabre” by a magic monkey! is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Using form: Quatern: Susan McLean, ‘Cropped’

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He doesn’t care for flowers or for fruit,
so don’t implore him not to clip or prune
the fig trees and camellias. His pursuit
of geometric form makes him immune

to luscious tastes and beauties others crave.
He doesn’t care for flowers or for fruit,
so once the buds appear, don’t try to save
them from his trimmer. All your pleas are moot.

He holds a tidy yard in high repute,
a verdant symbol of his mastery.
He doesn’t care for flowers or for fruit,
but takes some pleasure in your misery

as he destroys what you had hoped to see.
His need to have control is absolute,
and you can’t argue with machinery.
He doesn’t care for flowers or for fruit.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “This poem started with my desire to write a quatern, a form that I had encountered in Chad Abushanab’s workshop on rare poetic forms at the Poetry by the Sea conference in 2024. A quatern is four quatrains long, and the first line of stanza one becomes the second line of stanza two, and so on. As for the poem’s content, it grew out of a dispute about gardening practices with someone I know well. I was unable to convince him to change his ways. I should add that his ascribed motives are all conjectural on my part, not based on anything he said. But poets don’t really lose an argument; they just take the opportunity to restate it as a poem. This poem first appeared in the August 2025 issue of Snakeskin.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: Snakeskin

Political poem: Villanelle: Susan McLean, ‘Echo Chambers’

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Everyone wants peace, but votes for hawks.
A senator holds forth to an empty chamber.
No one listens. Everybody talks

conspiracies and outrage. Voting blocs
preserve their seamless fronts, and by November,
everyone wants peace, but votes for hawks.

I shoot my mouth off, and you shoot your Glocks.
Statesmen make deals they later can’t remember.
No one listens. Everybody talks

in slogans sold on T-shirts. Hackers doxx
judges whose moral codes are less than limber.
Everyone wants peace, but votes for hawks.

Act your rage, they tell you. Ragnarok’s
coming your way, to light you up like timber.
No one listens. Everybody talks

as midnight’s ticking closer on the clocks.
We’re parties of one, and one’s a lonely number.
Everyone wants peace, but votes for hawks.
No one listens. Everybody talks.

*****

Echo Chamber was originally published in Rattle‘s Poets Respond.

Susan McLean writes: “The original idea for the poem came when I heard about a senator addressing an empty chamber in Congress. I commented “No one listens. Everybody talks.” It occurred to me then that that would make a good repetend in a villanelle. As I worked on writing it, my feelings about other recent events influenced the direction the poem took. As I wrote in Poets Respond, “It wasn’t one story this week that inspired this poem, but a confluence of events: the proposed invasion of Gaza by Israel, the wildfires all over the U.S. and Canada, the lone shooter trying to register his outrage by killing people at the CDC, the Democrats fleeing Texas in an effort to prevent redistricting. It all felt apocalyptic and Wagnerian to me.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “Blah Blah Blah” by id-iom is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Susan McLean, ‘Anagram: A Pallor, An Edge’

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Late at night, I saw a glowing,
as if realms beyond our knowing
kindly solace were bestowing.
Could this phantom be my wife?
 
But the gleam, as I drew nearer,
taking form and growing clearer,
was my visage in the mirror,
and the figure held a knife.
 
“Fool,” said I, “your idle dreaming
on some insubstantial seeming
is some demon’s way of scheming
to mislead your soul to hell.

“Melancholy, doom-and-glooming,
pining, horror, guilt, exhuming,
Nevermore and Ulalume-ing –
write your angst out: that could sell.”

*****

Susan McLean writes: “This poem was inspired by a 2019 competition at The Spectator to write a poem in the style of a famous author and to have its title be an anagram of the poet’s name. I was a big fan of the poetry and short stories of Edgar Allan Poe when I was a teen, so I investigated words that I could draw from his name that would have strong associations with his work. Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, who died of tuberculosis eleven years later. Many of his poems and stories concern mourning for the death of a beautiful woman, including his most famous poem, “The Raven.” This poem borrows the trochaic meter and some elements of the rhyme scheme of that poem. It also alludes to a number of Poe’s favorite themes, and echoes some of his lines. It was not among the winners at The Spectator, but I later reworked it, and it recently appeared in Lighten Up Online.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

“Edgar Allan Poe (ilustración off topic)” by El Humilde Fotero del Pánico is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Quatrains: Susan McLean, ‘Pain Management’

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The management has gauged how much you’ll take
before you buckle or walk out. They care
about your health—at least until you break,
use up your sick leave, or require repair.

The management endorses your retiring
early. They will help you out the door,
so that they can economize by hiring
fresh blood for half of what they paid before.

The management can’t monetize your gain
in knowledge or experience. They doubt
that anything you’d do if you remain
could beat their savings if you’re shunted out.

They needn’t lay you off, just raise your stress
through higher workloads and adverse conditions,
until exhaustion, strain, and hopelessness
force you to leave, fulfilling their ambitions.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “In my lifetime, I’ve worked in private businesses, government agencies, and academia; most of them abused or exploited workers at some level, which is not surprising when power relations are one-sided. However, I was most shocked by what happened when the business model was applied to education. Education suffers when students are treated as products to be turned out as cheaply as possible, and when teachers are treated as easily replaceable cogs in a machine. But the mistreatment of workers to increase profitability is widespread across many forms of employment, so I did not want to limit the poem’s relevance to the academic world.

“Over the thirty years that I taught at a state university, states reduced the amount they paid for public higher education, shifting the economic burden more and more to the students, and creating budget crises for the universities. In response, university administrators reduced their hiring of professors, often increasing class sizes dramatically, shifting teaching of many classes to ridiculously underpaid grad students or adjunct instructors with no job security, and shutting down departments in order to lay off tenured professors. Students were paying more and getting less; professors were overworked and fearful of losing their jobs at ages at which no one else would be likely to hire them; recent PhDs were unable to find teaching jobs with a livable wage or any prospect of long-term employment. Meanwhile, administrative jobs were burgeoning, adding more deans and assistant deans to bolster the status and shoulder the duties of those in charge.

“The stress and overwork that many professors experienced under the business model of higher education took a physical toll on many, with some disciplines suffering more than others. Those who had to spend endless hours at computers or grading papers tended to develop back pain and a host of other ailments common to sedentary jobs. When administrators offered incentives for them to accept early retirement, so that the university could save money by replacing them with lower-paid workers, many retired. I was one of them.

“This poem got its start when I noticed that “pain management” (usually associated with using analgesics or other methods to reduce pain) could also mean “management by means of pain.” It was published in New Verse Review.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “Stress” by topgold is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Using form: Shakespearean sonnet: Susan McLean, ‘Foreshadowing’

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You’re a holiday.
—”Holiday,” The Bee Gees

One month from when you met me, when you brought
the first of many gifts, a 45
of plaintive praise and longing, who’d have thought
that forty-five years later we’d survive
on weekends, holidays, and summer breaks,
a foretaste of the end in every start,
anticipation ballasted with aches
as we put love on hold and live apart?

You are a holiday. The working week
unspools like toilet paper from a roll.
My attitude goes airborne when we speak,
and when we meet, my heart swoops like a shoal
of fish. Would we have lost this giddy glow,
living together? Better not to know.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “It makes me feel ancient to realize that for younger readers I will have to explain that a 45 was a record with one song on each side, which played on a record player at 45 revolutions per minute. Love poems themselves tend to feel old-fashioned these days, though this one is about a relatively modern problem, the long-term, long-distance relationship in which both people are employed full time at jobs far apart from one another. The form, a Shakespearean sonnet, mirrors the content, in that the rhymes are separated from one another until the end, when they are reunited. The poem was originally published in the online journal of female formalist poets Mezzo Cammin, and it later appeared in my second book of poetry, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.

Photo: “File:45 record.png” by laurianne is marked with CC0 1.0.

Susan McLean, ‘Home Economics’

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Like other teenage girls in ‘65,
I learned to knit, embroider, and crochet,
so if I’m teleported back in time
a century or two, I’ll do okay.

I learned the way to wrap a package neatly,
to tie a range of plain and froufrou bows,
to minimize my body flaws discreetly,
using the cut and pattern of my clothes.

I also learned to iron, hem, and baste,
to sew on zippers, trim, and appliqué,
to choose a hairdo that would suit my face—
and nothing that I ever use today.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “In the mid-Sixties, the times were changing, but the education of teenage girls was not. In junior high school home economics classes, which girls were required to take, the girls were trained in sewing and cooking skills as preparation for their future roles as wives and mothers. The ideas that men might need to know any of those skills or that women might have full-time careers were not considered. In addition to teaching girls domestic skills, the classes served to reinforce the gender roles and expectations of the time (which had not changed significantly from those of the previous few centuries).

“I slightly overstate my case when I say that I never use anything now that I learned in the two years of sewing classes I took. I still wrap a package and sew on a button occasionally, but I had learned both of those skills well before I took the classes. And even when I was taking the classes, I was already determined to have a career of my own. I petitioned successfully to be allowed to skip the cooking classes so that I could take art classes in their place (though, ironically or not, I am now an enthusiastic home cook). I didn’t mind learning various sewing skills, which had an artistic side, but I had no interest in spending a lot of time using them afterwards, and the view of my options that the classes conveyed was quite dispiriting. No one foresaw how radically the roles of many women would be changing soon afterwards. But I am very glad that they changed.

“The rhymed quatrains that the poem is written in are a standard poetic form, though the mix of slant rhymes with true rhymes suggests an underlying dissonance that ties in with the poem’s themes. The poem originally appeared in the online journal Umbrella and was later published in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “Home Economics Class at Elgin Court School, St. Thomas, 1961” by Elgin County Archives is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.