Yield, Jaime Forsythe
Wolsak and Wynn, 2026
This long poem dives into the experience of postpartum depression to which one has no choice but to yield. Early on, leaving the city with family including newborn for the seashore, “I unfold to the inarticulable / shroud”. Actions are automatic. Emotions are remote until “verging on shore, / where grey swells glide to their limits and melt.” This is the desired state, to melt into … nothing at all, or merely something else?
Presented against the backdrop of the Maritime coast, the metaphors are oceanic, reaching back to the amniotic fluid in which we all first learn to swim, and forward to a time when the postpartum veil is lifted. There are also the hallmarks of landlocked Maritime life: a dead mouse in the wall, identified by the smell of decay, the digging of wells, fields of birds and animals and insects, mudflats and bluffs. Then there are bathtubs and swimming pools and saltwater tanks, attempts to escape the weight of ideation.
At first, she flinches “passing the magnetic knife holder when I go down / / for water, like I’d close my fingers around its blade / by mistake.” She likens her breastfeeding child to lichen and the ebbing tide, remembers the pressure of birthing among other scattered memories, interspersed with facts about Maritime flora and fauna, wants to “join the sponge, the mermaid’s / purse, the moon snail … sea lettuce and invertebrates who / continue to exist” even as she relates to the bluffs, eroding “ten centimetres or fifteen each year / / and what an elegant blueprint for leaving, crumbling / exit, every hair that scores the tile a thread closer / / to stop”.
The physical trials: first menstruation post-birthing, the realization that one’s pelvic floor has weakened, stitches absorbed and an opening altered, waiting to flower, but “[c]offee grounds and death, / / peppermint oil and death: impossible to hide / the chemical reaction, decomposition wallpapered / / to our nostrils, our skulls.” Ideation slinks “in the dysphoric slide post-letdown … Letdown and every burner / left on high, door bolted from the inside.”
Also:
I’ve walked alone just as the sun’s gone
neon, in clouds of mosquitoes,
ears ringing
from your scream, the meadow rife with hidden
wells ready to take me. Dark
mouths under long
grass, inexplicable – easy. A matter of one step
into a slot – a room – a womb.
Later, Forsythe’s verse fragments—things always get worse before they get better—becomes lists of things seen, without explanation or sense. Sleep deprivation drains and dysregulates, enforces a kind of narcolepsy, sleep taking its chances wherever it finds them. Life blurs, becomes a dream, a mosaic of memory.
Observation becomes a means of healing, of reclamation: “I take notes in case / I’m asked to prove what I’ve seen with two eyes, / / sketch the reeds snaking in through the window’s / gap.”
Until finally:
“… I didn’t
expect to still be here, hunched over the unresolvable,
bobbing
between fight and surrender. The
signal fades in and out and out
and I want to join the air, which I’m told is a door to the
next
phase of thinking where I learn
to unlatch from my spirals.”
Liminality and the juxtaposition of states play out in couplets. A gorgeous exploration of the postpartum experience.
Melanie Marttila (she/her) is an #ActuallyAutistic author-in-progress, writing poetry and tales of hope in the face of adversity. Her poetry has appeared in The /tƐmz/ Review, Polar Starlight, Sulphur, and her debut poetry collection, The Art of Floating, was published in 2024 by Latitude 46. Her short fiction has appeared in SuperCanucks, Through the Portal, and Pulp Literature. She is a settler writing in Sudbury, or ‘N’Swakamok, on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory, home of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek and the Wahnapitae First Nation, in the house where three generations of her family have lived, on the street that bears her surname, with her spouse and their dog, Torvi.
