Notes on Segments by Sean Tate

Sean Tate is a writer from Ireland. Their most recent story, “With Your Hand in Mine, I will Follow” won Andromeda’s short story competition in the General Fiction category and their poem, “In this Moment”, was published by the Dark Poets Club. They used to write and produce their podcast entitled Bald Man Stories. Bald Man Stories was a collection of their surreal and weird fiction and is still available on iTunes, Spotify, and wherever else you find your podcasts.

Instagram: @sobaldrightnow

Read the original poem here.

The poem came about in a very mundane way. I was out on an event for work and my mind wandered to my father and how he never eats a single piece of fruit, it always has to be the equivalent of a fruit basket. His logic is: Oh, it's good for you so you can eat as much as you want! I was also trying to get into his head a little bit.

Segments of orange, eaten one. by. one.

Here I'm trying to convey the process that goes into eating an orange by using the period: "eaten one. by. one." You eat each segment of orange one piece at a time and have to put work into eating it. It's not a piece of fruit that you zone out while munching on like you would an apple; eating an orange is a bit of a commitment.

Flowing juices

What I love about poetry is that, not only can you paint a picture through description, but you can drive home what you're looking to say through the layout of the letters on the page. With the way I laid out the word "drip", I'm hoping the reader sees fruit juices drip down a chin, hang for a moment as a tiny sugary droplet, and then succumb to the power of gravity.

White shirt. Citrus stains.

A lasting reminder.

Here I'm trying to ignite a memory of childhood in the reader. You know when your mother would send you to a birthday party in a pristine white shirt and you'd return home with it stained with likes of TK lemonade? I was also thinking about how what you eat can be quite impermanent but can live on in the form of stains after the food has been forgotten.

Rotting apple cores,

scattered across the floor

I could have easily written "Rotting apple cores, scattered across the floor," but I wanted to really show that the apple cores were s c a t t e r e d and not just scattered. I don't want you to just read it, I want you to be able to see it as well. Poetry can be a powerful visual medium of expression. Painting with words is one way of looking at it.

Unopened windows.

Stale air. Incessant buzzing.

Flies make a home.

I was trying to create a feeling of confinement and claustrophobia here. Have you ever been in a stuffy office with the sun beaming in at you and all you want to do is crack open a window to feel even the tiniest flow of air across your face? Or you’ve come home after a holiday and found that you forgot to throw out some food and are now greeted by squatters in the form of fruit flies that populate that stagnant air?

I also need to throw some credit towards William Carlos Williams’ poem This Is Just To Say. He said so much with so little and proved that you don’t need overly flowery language to create a lasting impact on your readers.