Finding Solace After the Storm
A Conversation with Denise Duhamel
It’s hard not to go on and on about the many pleasures of Denise Duhamel’s elegies to her mother in her new collection, Pink Lady. There is her effortless mix of poignancy and humor in the face of life’s hardest losses; the surprise of new life that awaits her in the placid ocean after a tropical storm; the pain of separation by geography, impeding visits to her dying mother during COVID, which reveals a connection stronger and more vast than any impediment could disrupt; the self-imposed duty to watch the relentlessly dark TV series, Black List, not because she likes the show, but because her mother loves it and falls asleep before each episode ends. When her mother wakes, she’s able to fill in the blanks. And on and on…
I spoke with Denise in 2021, three months after her mother died, for an interview for the very last issue of upstreet literary magazine. She had just started writing the poems that would become Pink Lady. Plume has gained the necessary permissions to carry that first interview in our archives so that it can be read in conjunction with this new interview. The first interview gives a reader the full scope of Denise’s writing life from childhood up to the present (she started writing when she was 10) along with wonderful stories about beloved teachers, important influences, and writing partners.
I encourage you to check out this first interview as well as the one before you here. I have no doubt it – she — will astonish and delight you.
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Denise Duhamel: Hi! Good to talk to you. We’re about to get this tropical storm. It says: “rain coming in 120 minutes” so this talk is actually perfect timing.
Frances Richey: Haha!! Mother Nature is our timer. Congratulations on your new collection of elegies: Pink Lady! I still feel lucky that we got to publish several early poems in our last-ever issue of upstreet.
DD: I feel gratitude, too.
FR: How many years has it been?
DD: The last time we spoke was in the fall after my mother died in July of 2021. Half of these poems weren’t written yet.
FR: It’s amazing that you were able to write these poems in such a short time, comparatively speaking. They must have poured out of you.
DD: They really did. So many of them.
FR: As I read the book, I was reminded that your mom went through those last months of her life in a Nursing Home during COVID. I was struck by that moment when the Nursing Home had to stop patients’ visits with the Barn Babies, those little animals they brought into the basement for patients to pet
BARN BABIES
Trying to keep its residents safe, the nursing home
suspends all activities. No sing-along Tuesdays, no Lifetime
movies with popcorn and juice. No physical therapy
for my mother. No strolls down the hall where she’d
keep a book on the seat of her walker in case she needed
a rest. No rolling into the family room with the curio cabinet
full of teacups, with the window overlooking the geese.
No bingo, no trivia night, no piano bar. And no Barn Babies,
my mother’s favorite pastime. She and the other residents
were wheeled into the elevator, then down to the basement
where they could hold bunnies, kittens, and puppies,
where they could pet a diapered goat or lamb, a potbellied pig,
where they could watch the chicks and ducklings peck at food
pellets on the cement floor.
In trying to keep the world safe,
the rest of us shelter-in-place. In our absence, animals
take to the streets. As I walk nearly empty Florida paths
the chameleons and lizards are out in full force.
In Dania Beach, the next town north, Brian Wood
is making masks from the skins of Burmese pythons,
an invasive species taking over the Everglades.
Mountain goats
roam a seaside town in Wales. Wild deer look into an empty
Samsung store in Sri Lanka. Cows sunbathe on a Corsica beach.
Hundreds of monkeys surround the presidential palace
in New Delhi. A herd of goats runs through San Jose
stopping to eat plants from suburban lawns. Wild boar
and red foxes saunter through Israel, while fox cubs
frolic in a Toronto parking lot. In Bolivia, horses and llamas
trek a deserted highway.
And speaking of llamas,
their nanobodies could potentially be used as a treatment
for people infected with COVID-19. When I phone my mother,
a retired nurse, I tell her of this development.
Llamas! she says. Let me tell the CNA. If llamas are that good
for us, maybe we can get Barn Babies back.
DD: Yes, they took the animals away. That was so sad. I think at first my mom thought the activities were super corny—like I don’t belong in a nursing home—but then she really got into Barn Babies and the activities were taken away because of COVID. She reluctantly tried the sing-alongs, and then enjoyed them, and then even they were gone.
FR: Would you say more about how it was for you going through this during COVID?
DD: It was terrible. My mom went into the nursing home in late December of 2019. and I told her, I’m in Florida, you’re in Rhode Island, but I will be there, I will be there. And I did go once a month and planned to continue. The last time I saw her was for Valentine’s Day, so we only had 2 1/2 months, and then everything was ripped away and shut down. Her issue was mobility, arthritis and falling, so she was mentally very sharp. She didn’t have very much going on in terms of dementia, so she was very aware of where she was. She was a nurse. I told her in March of 2020, Oh, we’re going to be out of school for a couple of weeks, but then we’re going to go back…and I’ll be seeing you soon. Remember at the beginning they said there would be a curve? My mother said, No, they’re not going to flatten it. If they’re reporting 20 cases, there are at least 2,000. She knew, she just knew. And that made it really painful for her. My sister lived very close to the nursing home, but she wasn’t allowed to visit either. My sister said my mother had told her that my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who was born in 1900, lived through the pandemic a century before. I only learned about this after the book was done.
FR: The one in 1917-18?
DD: Yes. My grandmother was eighteen years old, and my grandmother had told my mother that it was horrible. My mom knew what was coming. And, of course, neither of us had any confidence in the President.
FR: She knew how to count. Someone not in her world of medicine probably wouldn’t know how to figure out the number of cases.
DD: Exactly. My mother graduated from Nursing School in 1955 or 56, so she was an old school nurse. My mom would have been a doctor if it hadn’t been for her gender, right? She would tell stories of covering up for doctors, that the doctor wrote something wrong but she fixed it. She was just very astute when it came to things like that. It was terrible for her to have that awareness. But, on the other hand, looking at it in the most positive light, at least I could talk to her. As painful as it was, when I think that she could have been unable to speak, or she could have had dementia, it would have been worse. If she hadn’t remembered me, it would have been even harder.
FR: There was that moment, in one poem, when she held up the paper plate with her cheese and crackers to the Zoom screen and offered to share her snack with you. It reminded me of a time when my Dad had had several strokes and he had been so bitter in his later years about the way his life had gone. This one time I called him and he sounded young, and like he’d just awakened from a nap, maybe, and he said, “Why don’t you come over for lunch! I’m having hotdogs today…” and I was in Manhattan and he was in Charleston, WV. I don’t think I’d ever heard that youthful, hopeful voice before. I read that poem where your mom thinks she can share snacks with you on Zoom, and I thought, that probably happens a lot. Their minds don’t register how far away you are…Being in isolation for a whole year, or more, that has to hasten dementia, or confusion.
DD: Yes. And so many people died in the nursing home, and because she was alert, she heard the nurses in the room saying I can’t believe so-and-so died. My mom would remember these people from Barn Babies. It had to be terrifying and also depressing. I’m surprised she had the will to live. She was so strong.
FR: One of the things that came through in the book was her strength. She was an amazing woman. And there was also that kind of lingering question underneath everything: did she really want to be a mother?
DD: Yes…
FR: And I don’t know if you ever came to a conclusion about that. How can we know unless we ask them? I felt this admiration for her, for her strength. It came through.
DD: I’m so glad that came through in Pink Lady. I don’t have children, so wondering if my mother second-guessed having children could very well be my own projection. She was valedictorian of her class, smart as a whip, even in high school, and the guidance counselor said, Do you want to be a nurse or a teacher? When she told the story, she’d say, I chose nurse because I didn’t really like kids. (Laughter.) She said it as a joke, but you know, behind every joke there’s a little bit of the truth. She was a really wonderful great grandmother, grandmother, and mother, but she wasn’t delighted by children in a sappy way.
FR: An interesting thing that was going on through the book that kind of relates to that …you, as the adult daughter are looking back on the whole relationship and how you’ve changed places with her. It’s not uncommon.
When I was a hospice volunteer back in the late eighties, early nineties, we often bathed and cleaned patients up just as you would a baby.
One thing that surprised me during those years was that some of the patients we volunteers spent time with let us know they were okay after they died. In hospice we talked about the “I’m okay” dreams some of us were having. Have you had that kind of experience since your mom died?
DD: I love that! I haven’t had anything like that happen with my mom yet, but my friend, Maureen Seaton, died in the summer of 2023. She comes to me all the time.
FR: Does she?
DD: Yes. And she told me before she died—she was kind of in and out a lot— Your mom’s here and she’s going to help me transition. Maureen had met my mom only two times. And when my mom was in the nursing home, Maureen would send her flowers and postcards. They were both sick. And my mom would say, Oh! I got something from Maureen today and she was so happy. And then, after my mom died, and Maureen was getting close to death, she told me, I’m not afraid. Your mom’s here.
FR: So you and Maureen were talking on the phone.
DD: Yes. And now, I’ll be looking at a cloud and I’ll think, Oh my God, that’s Maureen! She’s always around.
I used to think in a much more scientific way, like ex-Catholics do. Now I believe in the energy of the deceased for sure.
FR: Was your mom associated with a hospice or did COVID knock that out?
DD: The last couple of weeks of her life she was with hospice, but it wasn’t a good hospice experience. Workers came to visit her, and asked all kinds of questions like, What’s your favorite music? But then that was kind of the last we saw of them. No one was there when my mom died. We missed her death by just a few minutes. Even the nurse was crying. She said she called hospice and no one picked up. It was the pandemic and everyone was so understaffed. I was angry at the time, but I know it wasn’t really anyone’s fault.
The other thing that happened, too, in hospice, was that my mother said, Yeah, my mom was just here. I think my grandmother may have helped my mom transition the way my mom helped Maureen transition.
FR: Would you say again, those first few lines of that Popeye poem you and Maureen wrote together?
DD: Of course! Maureen had a fascination with Popeye’s girlfriend Olive Oyl…Here’s the opening stanza of our sestina, “Caprice”:
From the day she met you-know-who, Olive Oyl was tortured by
spinach.
She’d mad a thousand green soufflés before she gave up the boot,
whipping eggs with spinach, splashing everything with oil, Cold-Pressed
and Virgin,
then sliding the pan into the oven with Popeye’s stern orders
to make it snappy. Why didn’t he like her honey-baked hams?
He preferred skinny
sausages, strung link to link like necklaces. Their lopsided kitchen
was no haven
FR: So I’m going to switch gears a little bit. One of the things I wondered about is if writing the poems drew you closer to thoughts of your own mortality, and also if having gone through this with your mom, do you think about things now that you want to have done or prepared before you go?
DD: Absolutely! I have a will. I have a lot of things in place. After my mom passed, I threw away so much junk. My mom had thrown a lot of her own stuff away, and it was a gift to us. I threw a lot of my own stuff away, too, and I told my sister to throw anything away that she didn’t want.
I gave eight hundred books, my own books, to the library at FIU, where I teach. I kept things that were signed. And I also try to give things away to people who would appreciate them. I had my friends go through my books.
FR: I remember in one of your poems, your mom got down to a couple of bowls, and a couple of spoons…
DD: Yes! In her case everything was so heavy because she had really bad arthritis and trouble lifting pans and such. It was kind of lovely, actually. I know things are only things, but sometimes they’re almost like totems. I took her mattress topper all the way back to Florida with me. It wasn’t an heirloom or anything, but I wanted to be close to her in that way.
FR: Another thing that showed up in Pink Lady, and I think has been in some of your earlier books, is that when your mother yelled at you, it was so crushing, even as an adult.
DD: Oh, absolutely. I hated it. It was awful.
FR: I was wondering, did any of your perceptions about her change as she was dying?
DD: Yeah. She had a temper. She did yell at us a lot when we were kids. And that brings up the thought, did she really want to be a mom? She was a good mom but she would get frustrated with us. Yelling is probably too strong a word. She was frustrated, and she was in so much pain. Even as a young woman, she had back trouble. Back in the day, nurses lifted huge people, and didn’t get much training in how to do that safely for their backs. Her body went through a lot being a nurse. I think I was slow in seeing my mom as a full person. I’m embarrassed to say so, but there it is. I finally did see her as whole and full. I always wanted her to be happy. I always wanted to please her. It’s almost impossible to make someone happy every single moment.
FR: You must have been something as a little kid.
DD: I was bratty, and I had really bad asthma. Here’s my poor mom—not only did she have a kid, I was a sick kid. I was probably a handful, for sure.
FR: “Oh, please don’t let the doctors take my memory.” This is your mother speaking in one of your poems. Would you talk about that quote?
DD: Yes. Black List was her favorite TV show. I didn’t even like that show. But she kept falling asleep and we couldn’t record anything in the hospital. And there was no On-Demand. She was in and out, so she probably saw half of it. So it became my duty to watch it. It was so poignant to me. “Please don’t let them take my memory.” (A main character in the show is kidnapped and another character has the main character’s childhood memories erased.)
FR: That was a dark show. I remember finding out Liz’s childhood memories about that fire had been erased.
DD: It was really dark. I watched episodes for my mom, so I could tell her what happened if she’d fallen asleep.
FR: But it was also a smart show, well written, no matter how crazy the plot was, and well- acted. Your mom didn’t shrink from those tough, weird story lines, and I thought, I like this woman, your mom. She’s strong and she’s the kind of person who would, even if her arthritis was killing her, she would rush in to help somebody if they were in trouble or sick.
DD: Yes. She was so nice to the nurses because she had been a nurse. She said things like Oh, I don’t need a bath. I know you’re busy. She was quite undemanding as a patient because she remembered how hard it was for her when she worked. During the pandemic there was a nurse shortage because they kept getting sick. And some of the aides were paid so little, they just quit. If they had kids, why would they work in a nursing home when the danger of catching COVID was so high?
FR: I still can’t believe it. I still can’t believe we sheltered-in for two years! And your mom, in her room in that nursing home…she couldn’t even go out into the hallway.
Are you there? You’re breaking up a little bit…
DD: I’m here.
FR: I know you’re literally waiting for a tropical storm to come in right now. And I have here in my notes “After The Tropical Storm” which is one of my absolute favorite poems in the book, when you swam with the baby loggerheads!
DD: Oh, thank you!!
AFTER THE TROPICAL STORM
I walk into the Atlantic, the silt so soft
I feel like I’m trudging through mud.
I begin to swim towards the horizon. It is then
I see the baby loggerheads, newly hatched,
the size of quarters, paddling beside me.
When they swerve, I swerve. When they bob
on the surface, so do I. My mother
has just died. I follow the turtles
for two miles at which point I become
one of them, or they one of me, our shells hardening.
We eat kelp and fish eggs, keep each other company.
We grow and have babies of our own.
Theirs are inside eggs. Mine are inside little poems.
FR: It’s mystical and transformational…all the things we were just talking about.
DD: Thank you! I was missing my mom so much. She died in July. The tropical storm was probably August or September, and I just went into the ocean and I saw this little baby loggerhead and I just sort of followed it. It was one of those poetry moments, feeling connected to all creatures. The turtle was just really little. And then I saw a bunch of them. And I thought, They’re starting their lives. It made me so happy.
FR: Did you really swim two miles out? (Laughter.)
DD: I probably didn’t. I think I’m exaggerating. (Laughter.) I swam a lot longer than I normally do though.
FR: Did you swim out to the horizon? (Laughter.)
DD: I swam out further than I usually do, and then I turned around.
FR: You must be a strong swimmer.
DD: I’m not. I was paddling, really…
FR: But you were out in the ocean!
DD: Yeah. Yeah. But after tropical storms, the ocean is flat, like a lake. You know what I mean?
FR: No. No, I don’t.
DD: During a tropical storm or hurricane, there are giant waves and riptides…But when it’s over it’s still. So paddling out there is easier than it sounds. It wasn’t like that movie that just came out, Jodie Foster and Annette Benning, the woman who swims from Cuba to Florida…
FR: The one about Diana Nyad, the long distance swimmer who was 64 when she made that swim…
DD: Yes, believe me, it was nothing like that.
FR: But you were with them, the baby loggerheads, and they were swimming for their lives. When they’re in the sand, they don’t all make it to the ocean. You went in the water missing your mom, and when you were out there, you were surrounded by all this new life, this aliveness…
DD: Yeah! I think that’s why I swam so far. I was just mesmerized by them. They were swimming faster than I was. And they’re tiny. They’re really tiny. And you’re right, they don’t all make it. Where I live the loggerheads have different seasons. And right now there are cones with caution tape around the nests. They’re in there right now, but they’re not ready to hatch yet. They’ll be ready soon, at the end of August or in September.
I live in Hollywood, Florida, and everything, environmentally, is going to crap, except the turtles. The turtles have this really strong lobby and so we have ambient light for the street lights. They’re dimmer, and then we’re asked to not turn on our lights at night if we face the ocean, or to make sure our curtains are closed. People love the turtles. So most people comply, including the hotels. Even kids know. I’ve heard little kids say, Mom, turn off your lights on your bike, Everyone is pretty good about it.
FR: That is so lovely. I read that red light is better than regular light.
DD: Yes, exactly.
FR: I love the whole turtle thing.
DD: If you ever come to Florida, I’ll show you the turtle nests!
FR: Do you love it there?
DD: Yes, but climate change is way too terrifying. This is supposed to be one of the worst hurricane seasons, coming up. I’m in a blue bubble, in Broward County, where we love our turtles. But politically, it’s scary to live here now. When I moved here, I was thirty nine or forty and I thought I’d be able to slide right into retirement in the same place. I love the ocean, I love so many things about it, but it might be too perilous now. There’s flooding all the time. It’s downright scary. So I’m thinking about moving north for hurricane season after I retire. I can’t imagine being eighty or ninety, cleaning up after a hurricane. It’s pretty devastating.
FR: And there are a lot of people down there that age, right?
DD: Yes. I don’t know who lobbies for those turtles! They have it good. But the other creatures, like humans, aren’t as well cared for.
FR: If only they could vote!
DD: Yeah! (Laughter.) There’s a lot of them.
FR: Just a last thought on that. I jotted down a note beside your loggerhead poem that becoming one with anything is amazing, even transformational! That’s such a moment in the poem. And that poem is perfectly placed in the book. It was toward the end, when those mystical things do tend to happen. The placement, the timing and then just becoming one with those baby turtles who are at the beginning of their lives, swimming their hearts out to survive. How do they know? How do they know where to go?
DD: The beginning of life is probably as terrifying and new and scary as the end of life.
FR: I think being born must be absolutely terrifying.
DD: Imagine! It’s cold, it’s bright…the beginning and the end…
FR: And yet, I think there must be something wonderful on the other side.
DD: I think so too. I don’t believe in hell, or any of that stuff. It makes no sense.
FR: What about the Catholicism part of things for you? Hell is a big piece of their doctrine, right?
DD: I know! But we also have that get-out-of-jail card with confession. So it’s pretty nonsensical. You prepare for all these inevitabilities and something completely different happens.
FR: Are you thinking of something in particular?
DD: Uncle Will, who’s in one of the Pink Lady poems, came home from WWII with shell shock. He was almost like a dad to my mother because her father died when she was young. He wound up marrying a woman who was ten years younger than he. He buys all kinds of insurance so she’d be taken care of in the event of his death. Then she predeceases him when she is quite young. That kind of thing is what I mean. I think my mom was trying to prepare and then came the COVID thing, no one was prepared for.
FR: There was a line in “Impossible Poem,” that line that “I can’t write more” and you bury her in the ground. That was such a moment. And I think it was in a different poem, where you talked about being in your own coffin.
DD: Oh yes! That was toward the end…
FR: What was it you were asking for in your coffin? You were asking for something…
DD: Those glow-in-the-dark ceiling stars. I always wanted those. My nieces had them as a kids.
I HAVE SLEPT IN MANY PLACES
First in the womb, my own space capsule
in my mother’s universe, my eyelids sticky with pre-birth,
then the incubator and crib, which I didn’t recognize
as a prison until years later when my sister stood inside it
and I, rising from my first big-girl bed, unlatched her
because she was hungry for breakfast. Then my Grammy’s
four-poster, kiddy sleeping bag, the hospital bed,
where I was hoarse after I had my tonsils removed. A mat
during kindergarten naptime, the backseat of my mother’s car,
another hospital bed with silver bars on the side
where I wrote my first stories. The double bed I shared
with my sister when our twins gave out. A college dorm
mattress with another girl’s period stain, a damp study-abroad
bed in Wales, Eurail seats where I could sleep overnight
and save money on a hostel if I picked the right schedule.
Hostel bunk beds with bathrooms down the hall. A friend’s
waterbed, another friend’s bed on her father’s boat.
Then my cousin’s hand-me-down mattress
in my first apartment in Boston, a boyfriend’s bed
in Revere, a bed of another boy hoping to make
my Revere boyfriend jealous. Sublet beds,
a bed in a furnished studio apartment in Tucson
where there was no way of knowing who’d slept on it
before me. Futon in the East Village right on the floor.
Same futon on a used loft bed to suspend me above the mice.
Then a lavender pullout Mary Richards couch.
Vacation beds, hotel beds. More boyfriend beds
in Brooklyn and Alphabet City. Motel beds.
Florida marital bed and another hospital bed—
this time surgery. Divorce bed (same as marital bed
with mattress flipped for good luck). Evacuation beds
during hurricanes. My true-love’s bed with its magic
mattress topper. I know I am forgetting so many places—
subways, lounge chairs in the sand, Amtrak seats,
movie theaters, hammocks, stadium bleachers
at my niece’s college graduation (I had taken a Vicodin),
conference beds, beds at university housing
or hotels after I’d given poetry readings, emergency row
plane seats, on my mother’s breast when I was an
infant, in my father’s arms after a childhood asthma attack.
My parents’ bed after their deaths. I’m heading
for the hard coffin bed myself, my eyes sewn shut
against insomnia. I’ll stipulate that the undertaker
press glow-in-the-dark stars inside the lid.
FR: I still go back to that line when you can’t write more, and then you bury your mom in the ground…
DD: I’m so glad you brought that up because I’d already written so much about her death that I was afraid it seemed like an untrue statement!
FR: It felt so true. Especially coming at the end. Obviously, there’s another poem or two after that poem, but it’s a moment in time…
DD: It’s like, how much of it is your story to tell? I felt like I had to almost talk to my mom from beyond…and ask her is this poem okay?
FR: Did you do that? Did you talk to her as the book was coming to fruition? Almost finished or finished?
DD: She was already passed, but I did talk to her.
FR: I’m talking to you like you’re a hospice volunteer. You may think this is crazy, but I think people who have passed can be in communication in more than one place at the same time. It’s as if they somehow put out something, an energy or vibration, that can go all these different places all at once.
DD: Absolutely. I think it’s like when you’re a tiny kid, you can just see more and sense more…
FR: Do you have a favorite poem of your own in this book? I’ve told you my favorite…the turtles! I also loved “The Many Places…” But do you have one that is particularly resonant for you?
DD: The one, weirdly enough, that’s called “Snow Globe” the one where my mom has the nurses open the windows. When she told me that story, I was so moved.
SNOW GLOBE
My mother tells me the nurses dress like astronauts.
Mount St. Rita’s must go on the assumption
that any of the patients could be infected. The RNs complain
that it’s hot under their masks and visors, gowns and jumpsuits.
My mother suggests the nurses open the window for air,
even though it’s chilly, even though it’s a nor’easter.
All they had to do was get me a blanket. Poor things,
they’re working so hard. Then her room is a globe,
everyone’s world shaken, snowflakes and stars.
FR: Do you consider this book a hybrid book? There’s one long poem that’s a prose poem.
DD: You mean “Communique: Emails from Mount St. Rita’s?” That’s also a ‘found poem.’ Those were all real emails.
FR: I wasn’t thinking about that one, but you’re right, that’s a prose poem too.
DD: I bet you mean “Monkey Mind.”
FR: That’s the one.
DD: That’s really long, and though it’s lineated it really does read like prose!
FR: We’re seeing so many hybrid books, and I like them. As long as everything coheres as a piece. I generally think of a collection of poems as one long poem with a lot of turns.
DD: Right. Someone told me Robert Frost said, “If you have a book of 25 poems, your 26th poem is the book.” So to think of the poems as working together is to make one poem at the end. I hope it was Robert Frost? Now I’m doubting myself, but someone big and important said it.
FR: That’s amazing. I’ve never heard that.
Okay! Your title, Pink Lady. Are you talking about the apple?
DD: Yes. Pink Lady is the apple. But also, thinking of Candy-stripers. Pink Ladies are volunteers, sort of like candy-stripers, but they’re older. Sometimes retired.
FR: Would you say a bit about how you came to the title?
DD: Yeah, so I had so many titles. Maureen wanted it to be Hum. Pink Lady was one of the last poems that I wrote for the collection. And then I remembered the Pink Lady volunteers that were in the nursing home on Valentine’s Day. I was trying to use it as a metaphor.
I couldn’t eat apples anymore because they reminded me too much of my mom and that time during COVID.
FR: So the title, the apples in particular, call to how we have to give things up…
DD: I still love the apples.
FR: Do you still not eat them?
DD: Only occasionally. But I used to eat them every day. It was my thing. I loved them. Every morning. But during the pandemic I was afraid to eat apples because someone had already touched them.
FR: We had to wash everything with soap when we brought it home.
DD: Yes! I was so paranoid. Then I just got out of my apple-chomping habit. I learned to live without them. I learned to live without my mom. No choice, really.
FR: Yes. I’m getting it, just now, that you can give up things you really love if you have to. Like the Pink Lady apple. Like the physical presence of your mom.
DD: I’m glad I said it out loud. Thanks for talking to me, Fran. This has been wonderful!
Denise Duhamel is, most recently, the author of Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Which (2024) is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize. She and the late Maureen Seaton co-authored five collections, the most recent of which are CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015) and Tilt (Bridwell Press, 2025). Her other titles include Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times and her book of lyric essays with Julie Marie Wade is The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). A recipient of NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, she also is a distinguished university professor at Florida International University in Miami.
