In Their Own Words
Patrycja Humienik on “Magnolia”
Magnolia
Blooming in stars, bells, cups, and saucers, before bees, before derelict cities.
I can’t google you without involving the suspicious affliction of needing
to name, or the geopolitics of search engines. I just want your petals
casting shadows across my face. And to know if they are edible.
Many botanists say yes: raw, cooked, pickled, dried.
Must I consume to love?
Must I be consumed by love?
I trust you know the answer, pollinated by
beetles 95 million years ago. I pluck your sturdy petals, make
tea. Imagine I can read the desiccated pulp. A kind of sacrament
to taste and be tasted. When I am one day buried in the dirt, I offer my
frame, tissue, heart. You didn’t ask me to live on like this. I’m asking you.
From We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025). Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
On “Magnolia”
This poem is from the second half of my debut poetry collection. We Contain Landscapes engages with my enduring obsessions: borders, time, the relationship between land and body, desire, possession, and the illusion of national belonging. It is also a book about dreaming—visiting, even briefly, the places in ourselves we rarely touch.
One night a couple of years ago, on a writing residency with Gabrielle Bates, on an island in the Pacific Northwest with a surreal number of black foxes, I dreamt of a poetic form. The name of the form, “Cradle-Magnolia,” came to me in the dream, in which I saw only its shape. The next morning, I read more about the flowering tree I had loved since childhood.
I learned magnolias are ancient—they were pollinated by beetles and predate bees. I considered cradle as verb and noun. Site of birth, hurt, love, holding. Where and how we enact care, tenderness, protection. I jotted some notes and proceeded to ignore the dream’s invitation for over two years. In a workshop with Amy Quan Barry, I returned to those notes and that fragment of dreaming.
There is an absurdity to taking seriously what comes to us in dreams. Such absurdities are the realm of the poet. I think often of the line from Wisława Szymborska’s “Possibilities,” translated by Barańczak and Cavanagh: “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems, / to the absurdity of not writing poems.”
I’m calling this dream-form the Cradle for short. What holds us, what rocks us? The form’s constraints include: a direct address to a natural element/non-human living being; twelve lines, for the hours; lines that start long and steadily shorten to cradle two questions in the middle, before lengthening back out; a reference to, or engagement with, something revealed in a dream. Let me know if you write one.
