Jeremy Luke Hill : on a burrow, a nest, a lea stone

 

 

 

 

Most of the poetry I write involves playing with other people's words–rewriting the statements of Trump administration officials into modified Spencerian stanzas, or using chunks of Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers to explore how books get recontextualized over time, or suturing quotations from dozens of different poets into a single poem. It tends to be playful and cerebral. Not much of it is personal.

The poems in a burrow, a nest, a lea stone (above/ground press, 2025), in contrast, as well as those in my previous chapbook, Microchimaera (Baseline Press, 2024), are almost painfully personal to me. I started writing them around 2003, when my wife and I first began the adoption and fostering process, and I continued with them over the next fifteen years that we were involved with Family and Children's Services. During that time we became parents to a foster child, two adoptive children, and a birth child. I was involved in teaching a training course for people who were looking to become foster or adoptive parents. My wife and I also founded a week of summer camp, which we still run, for foster and adoptive families. All of which found its way into these poems.

I never submitted any of this material for publication though, not at the time, because more than a few of the poems were critical of the child welfare system, and almost all of them addressed the difficulties involved in parenting children with trauma. I was worried that Family and Children's Services would become aware of them and be less inclined to place children with us. It was unlikely, I knew, but I felt that the potential consequences made even a slight risk unjustifiable. So I held on to the poems. Treasured them up.

When at last we made the difficult decision not to parent more children, when we were at last done with the child protection system, it felt like the closure of a significant period in our life as a family. Returning to the poems I had written over those years and forming them into a collection of some kind seemed like a way to process what that period in my life had meant for me.

The result, with varying degrees of input from people like Jim Johnstone, Shane Neilson, A.F. Moritz, Roxanna Bennett, and others, has become organized into three distinct groupings–a suite of short poems that was published as Microchimaera and has since been restructured into a sonnet crown; a long poem that relates the inciting experience behind my wife and I deciding to pursue adoption; and a series of poems in couplets exploring imagery associated with adoption, which became a burrow, a nest, a lea stone.

 

 

 

Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Gordon Hill Press and The Porcupine's Quill, small press literary publishers based in Guelph, Ontario. He has written several books, chapbooks, and broadsheets, most recently Microchimaera (Baseline Press, 2024), winner of the 2025 bpNichol Chapbook Award. His writing has appeared in many magazines and journals, including The Antigonish Review, ARC Poetry, CNQ, CV2, EVENT Magazine, filling Station, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, The Maynard, and The Puritan.

Jeremy Luke Hill : two poems

 

Microchimaerism

Microchimaerism is the presence of genetically distinct cells in one body. In nature, it occurs only through the transfer of cells between mother and fetus during pregnancy. The child's cells are carried in the mother’s body for years afterwards, perhaps for life.

We exchange cells with children in our care.
No matter how they come to us, we become 

one creature. You may as well divide soul
from spirit, or joint from marrow, or sense 

from matters of the heart. The mythological
chimaera was composed of lion, goat, 

and dragon. My eldest son is none of these.
He is the wolf, by way of a surname 

passed down through his mother's line.
Chimaeric cells increase immunity 

in mother and foetus, but also cancers.
This is called love coming at a cost. 

The chimaera of myth was slain by arrows
from the safe height of a flying Pegasus. 

My middle son flies too. He is the hawk,
an inheritance from his birth-father, name 

begetting name. We can't discern blood
from blood through human senses. A mother's 

wounds may flow with a child's cells and she
will never know. If she puts her lips to the cut, 

she'll taste only mineral and bitter iron,
never the memory of the child she bore. 

Parenthood guarantees nothing except
that we carry our children in this way. 

My youngest son is the ram, has always been.
No one remembers why. Though he has names 

in plenty, none means ram. The word chimaera
can describe any hybrid of human 

and beast, usually implying monstrosity,
usually when it has no other name. 

It might be used to name a new creature
combining wolf and hawk and ram. 

My foster daughter was not with us long
enough to discover her animal self. 

This has always felt like a metaphor
for what we lost. Cells that are transferred 

early from the fetus to the mother sometimes
combine with the mother's organs, become part 

of her body, so that her heart will beat,
at least in some small way, with her child’s DNA. 

Nature does not care when it falls into cliché.

 

Cuckoo Birds 

Cuckoo birds are brood parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other birds. This behaviour is an evolutionary strategy that benefits the parasitic parents by allowing them to avoid the risk and investment of raising young themselves. This is why the phrase "cuckoo's egg" is sometimes used to describe children who are orphaned or adopted. 

The commonest question: How can you love them
as your own? The shells of cuckoo eggs can be 

thicker and stronger than those of their hosts
and have two distinct layers: the inner thin 

like a chicken egg, the outer thick and chalky
to protect them when being dropped into the nest. 

Adoption and fostering are experienced as trauma,
always. In some stories the cuckoo sucks the eggs 

of other birds before laying its own in the nest.
This is false. Another question: Is it awkward 

that they don't look like you? Female cuckoos
often lay eggs that resemble those of their host. 

I have been mistaken for my kids' coach, teacher,
social worker. I have known concerned citizens 

to call Children's Aid to report child trafficking
when a father picks his adoptive children up 

from school. This is called seeing something
and saying something. And still another question: 

How much do you get paid to take these kids?
Cuckoo chicks encourage the host to feed them 

with begging calls and open mouths. The basis
of attachment is a child's satisfied need. Cuckoo 

eggs hatch earlier than the host's eggs. The chicks
grow faster, evicting the nestlings of the host. 

They have no social model for this behaviour.
It is instinct. Not the last question: Why would you 

do some other parent's job for them? The term
"cuckold" has long been used to mock husbands 

whose wives are having affairs. Similarly, "cuck"
has become an insult among insecure man-babies 

for those they perceive to be weak and sensitive.
Cuckoos have no way to recognize their offspring 

once they are grown. My kids know their birth
and foster parents, more or less. Some traditions 

hold that the cuckoo, if burnt and the ashes eaten,
can cure stomach pains and insomnia. There is 

an association between cuckoos and loneliness.

 

 

 

 

Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Gordon Hill Press and The Porcupine's Quill, small press literary publishers based in Guelph, Ontario. He has written several books, chapbooks, and broadsheets, most recently Microchimaera (Baseline Press, 2024). His writing has appeared in many magazines and journals, including The Antigonish Review, ARC Poetry, CNQ, CV2, EVENT Magazine, Filling Station, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, The Maynard, and The Puritan. His latest publication, the chapbook a nest, a burrow, a lea stone, is forthcoming with above/ground press.

Letter : Jeremy Luke Hill responds to Greg Rhyno

 

 

I know it's not common (or even proper?) for authors to respond to their reviewers. Authors are supposed to grin and bear their reviews, no matter what they say. But given that Ordinary Eternal Machinery is about conversation in the first place, and given that Greg Rhyno's review pushes that conversation in a direction it probably needs, I'd like to keep it going at least one step further.

Near the end of his review, Rhyno says this – "What’s missing from this exchange [between myself, Cohen's book, and my interlocutor, John Nyman] are the marginalized voices Cohen co-opts: the survivors of personal and historical horrors. As it is, this chapbook represents one kind of privilege interrogating another. Some external oversight would be welcome."

Yeah. He's so right. Particularly when you consider that the publisher, Aaron Schneider, is also a middle-aged, middle-class, White guy. As is Rhyno himself. As is rob mclennan, the editor posting the review. Aw, shit.

Part of this is due to the nature of the project itself, of course. It's driving question was, "What should privileged people do with the books they love when those books are complicit (more so than usual) with the structures of privilege?" It makes a kind of sense that the people engaged with that question would be the privileged people concerned.

On the other hand, Rhyno's observation is absolutely just. Posing that question in isolation from the people being marginalized only perpetuates that marginalization, not to mention passing over other valuable perspectives on the issue.

So, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to send comp copies to some writers I know who identify with the marginalized in Cohen's novel, and I'll see if they have the time and inclination to respond to the problematic of Ordinary Eternal Machinery.

Jeremy Luke Hill