Two Poems
Susan McLean
The Year of the Snake
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I have peeled off my skin again.
Shedding the seamless life I’d made
feels blistering, like being flayed,
and I’m more rattled than I’ve been
in decades. Aching, raw, bereft,
I search for any salve to numb
the oozing wound that I’ve become,
still reaching back for what I left.
How much I wish I could refuse
the price of living: to outgrow
the skintight sheath of all I know
and all I care about; to lose
my job, my house, my town, my friends,
as one life starts and one life ends.​
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Susan’s notes:​​ “’The Year of the Snake’ was inspired by my retirement from my job after thirty years as an English professor. I had heard that the more changes you make in your life at once, the more stressful it is for you. I was not only retiring, but also selling my house and moving four hundred miles away from all of my friends there, to a city where I knew fewer people, almost all of whom were still employed. I spent a lot of time alone, was depressed, and found myself unable to write for about six months. This poem was written well after that time, at the start of the year designated as the Year of the Snake, according to the Chinese calendar. Hearing that name evoked for me the image of a snake shedding its skin, which reminded me of what I had gone through during my transition to retirement.”
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The Nick of Time
​​
Time to a child moves smoothly, even slowly,
till like her first encounter with a razor,
it opens a small gash that leaves a scar.
The blood is startling, but it doesn’t faze her.
She sees how stable things around her are.
When people leave, she knows they’re never wholly
gone; eventually they reappear.
​
And then they don’t. Her father’s mother dies.
Next, her father’s father. There’s a blade
shearing away the people she holds dear.
And where they lived goes, also. She’s dismayed
as huge swaths of her past are razed. She tries
to pack them in her mind like nested dolls.
​
Years pass as silent scythes mow down the dead—
neighbors, friends, relations, all laid low
at random, with a coolness that appalls.
And other blades are moving that don’t show:
unseen, a specter glides inside her head,
cutting connections, putting things to bed.
​
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Susan’s notes: “I like taking well-worn phrases and seeing them from a different angle that changes their meaning. In ’The Nick of Time,’ I use ’nick’ to mean a small cut, and proceed from the first damage I can remember, a cut from a razor blade, to other losses that left their own kinds of scars, to the realization that living inevitably brings greater and greater losses, of others, of memories, and eventually of life itself. Writing about those losses is one way of coming to terms with them.”
​​
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Both poems published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, September 2025
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Susan McLean is a retired English professor from Southwest Minnesota State University. She has published two poetry collections, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Latin poems by Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her third poetry book, Daylight Losing Time, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press.
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