“I can’t regret my actual life,” Anne Haven McDonnell writes in “The Baby Deer” (second poem on page), her beautiful and tender poem of the more-than-human, of mothering and not-mothering, intimacy and distance. Write about something you don’t regret, then something you do. Then write into what these two things have in common—where do they overlap, share edges, speak to each other?

OR

Write about something you regret, then write into how this regret might be healed, even if it seems un-healable. Feel free to leave the realm of what seems possible—what magic could you call on, what would you need (objects, beings, events) to remake the regret into something mended and whole?

Poem link: https://aboutplacejournal.org/issues/the-more-than-human-world/communion/anne-haven-mcdonnell/

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Bio: Kasey Jueds (she/her) is the author of two collections of poetry, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press: Keeper, which won the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and The Thicket. She lives in the mountains of New York State.