Sally Weston Ziph

SUSAN SMITH'S DREAM

The blue van rises
from the bottom of the lake

tilts on its side and floats
back to the dock. Water pours

out of its windows, forming
pockets of air that release the screams

of her small sons strapped
into car seats. Walking backward,

she turns to see the van heave
itself up onto the dock’s edge,

rolling toward her, slowly,
backwards, water

smoothing into surface,
under the moon’s white eye.


Sally's YouTube video reading of "Susan Smith's Dream":



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Sally confesses: "I remember hearing about the Susan Smith case in the summer of 1994 after reading Joyce Carol Oates' Chappaquiddick book, Black Water. That book really made me think about the horror of death by drowning, and the fact that Susan Smith drowned her two baby sons (and blamed it on a non-existent Black bogey-man), all because she wanted to get together with the town's rich boy, is truly the stuff of nightmares."

SALLY WESTON ZIPH's poems and short stories have appeared in The Five-Two, Bear River Review, Third Wednesday, Rat's Ass Review, and others. She is a University of Michigan Hopwood Award winner, and recently received her MFA degree from Miami University's low-res program, where she was a first runner up for the 2020 Miami American Academy of Poets Prize judged by poet Stephanie Young. She works as a librarian at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

The Cruelest Poetry Month 2022

April is National Poetry Month, "launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996 to remind the public that poets have an integral role to play in our culture and that poetry matters. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K–12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, families, and, of course, poets, marking poetry's important place in our lives."

The Five-Two participates with an annual blog tour. Originally called 30 Days of The Five-Two, featuring guest posts about Five-Two poems, its new name, from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", is apropos of our crime theme but also reflects the tour's growth beyond Five-Two poems. It's a chance for anyone to post about any poetry and introduce themselves and their work (poetry or not) to a new audience.

We will feature four debut Poems of the Week and any guest posts contributed in preparation for or during the tour itself. If you'd like to join, email me a link to your entry or the entry itself (text, video, etc.) to post here.


For April 6, Charles Rammelkamp's commentary on "Susan Smith's Dream" by Sally Weston Ziph:

Sally Weston Ziph’s chilling poem, the retributive nightmare of a woman who drowns her own children, must be read with the knowledge of the crimes on top of the crimes Smith committed, in our racially charged society. It’s the national nightmare. Not only did she kill her children, she blamed a black man. Her motive? Trying to make herself more attractive to a popular local white man. But along comes justice, at least in her dream.

The blue van rises
from the bottom of the lake

tilts on its side and floats
back to the dock.

You can almost hear the nightmare movie music swelling as the impossible happens with the ineluctable logic of dreams. “Water pours

out of its windows, forming
pockets of air that release the screams

of her small sons strapped
into car seats.

At this point the horror movie music reaches a crescendo with the screams of the victims. The moral karma at the heart of the world, in all dreams of cosmic justice, rears up and slaps Susan Smith as with a giant flyswatter. She stumbles backwards, the way the guilty do in all horror movies, as the van rolls slowly, ineluctably, toward her. Yes! How satisfying, the mother who kills her children and blames it on a nonexistent black man, punished in the theater of dreams! Her guilt is plain to all, visible to all, “under the moon’s white eye.” —Charles Rammelkamp

Best of the Net 2023 Selection

As editor of The Five-Two, I get to choose six poems published July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022 for Best of the Net 2023 consideration. Since every poem I publish is one of my favorites, I like to give The Five-Two's audience three of the six picks:

• You can vote by commenting on a poem's post or Liking its YouTube video.
• Your comment can be feedback on the poem or just "Best of the Net 2023."
• Deadline: The three poems receiving the most comments and Likes by Wednesday, September 14, 2022 will be submitted along with my three picks.

Here are the six nominations submitted September 29, 2022:

• "How to Make a Whale..." by Amy Holman (August 9, 2021)
• "Susan Smith's Dream" by Sally Weston Ziph (September 13, 2021)
• "The Devil Has Gone Home" by Sharon Waller Knutson (November 22, 2021)
• "Unresolved Story..." by Saira Viola (January 10, 2022)
• "Conversion" by Pamela Hobart Carter (May 16, 2022)
• "Her Shadow" by Kelly Sargent (June 20, 2022)

The complete anthology contents will be announced by the end of January 2023. Good luck to all.

30 Days of The 5-2 - Day 1: The Thrilling Detective Blog

Kevin Burton Smith discusses "Last Straw" by Susan Kelly. Kevin is also celebrating the fourteenth anniversary of his Thrilling Detective Web Site, for which I edited nine years of original fiction.

See the full 30 Days of The 5-2 schedule.