Sydney Hutt is a writer and English teacher from a suburb outside of Vancouver, British Columbia. She loves reading, running, black tea, and spending time with her identical twin daughters. You can find her poems and creative non-fiction in multiple literary magazines and websites, including Louden Singletree, Motherly, Raspberry Magazine, and issue 1.9 of lon con magazine.
“My poem responds to Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau. When I read it for the first time, I was very inspired by Thoreau’s ideas of simple living and withdrawing from society. I responded by deleting all of my social media pages and prioritizing both solitary time in nature and face-to-face interactions with loved ones. As a millennial who has grown up with the internet in all its forms, I was determined to make meaning for my life outside of it. For eighteen months, I was offline, and in that time I found a lot of peace, my attention span improved, I spent more time outside, and overall, I developed a better understanding of myself and my priorities. But withdrawing meant I was missing invitations and life updates all the time; as a writer, it was also challenging because many literary magazines and other writers utilize social media, and I felt cut off from those opportunities and communities. When I created an Instagram account again, I told myself it was solely to stay connected, but my own weaknesses quickly caught up with me, and I explore those in this poem. I also grapple with Thoreau’s ideals and my own limits and realities as a woman in my thirties and single mother of two who works full-time and has had a myriad of health issues. Lastly, in this poem, I play with Thoreau’s name and the idea of being ‘thorough’—of carefully, mindfully combing through my life and my decisions.”
In the past I tried to be Thoreau
to Walden Pond my bad habits.
Now I’ve returned to Instagram
for the poets but my “For
You” page is a checkerboard
of beautiful men instead
of lit mags, and I’m scared
of the search bar,
that the algorithm
might come to know me better
than the therapist, who asks
beside Ikea décor
what my friends would say
about me; better than the moon
in his jurisdiction; than the
eyes of the children
as they plead for
something more
from this dusty flaking
shell.
I am young. I birthed
the table, round and
notched. My abdomen
is held together
by flesh cobwebs
connecting all the
parts they shouldn’t.
I dream we will supper
on stumps
in the pond’s eternal sun
and sweat will spill
from my back as I scrape
rows alone, till soil
pile rocks with purpose,
grow green beans
by hand. But I am stumped
by kidney stones, gallstones,
dyspepsia, GERD, TMJ.
I cannot leave this place
for yours. I am old
enough to have watched
my daughters grow fierce,
their dark brows furrowed
against the world.
