Bio: Darci Schummer

I grew up in Fall Creek, Wisconsin, population 1,380, as a Jehovah’s Witness. In this way, I have always felt like an outsider and identified that way. Even after having left that faith tradition, my lack of cultural references, inexperience, and naivety kept me feeling like an outsider. To this day, I’m not a joiner and have retained a pronounced distaste for any organized religion. I often feel that I live in two worlds simultaneously. It was normal to live that way as part of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They call it leading a double life, but for many it was a means of coping and survival. 

The poems included in this submission reflect my journey to the West from the Midwest in 2023. They are some of the first I wrote in this new landscape, and illustrate the fact that you can move 1,000 miles away from a place where bad things happened, but the bad things, the unhealthy coping skills, the grief follows. The twins in the poems reflect the doubling I describe in the paragraph above. What happens when two people share so many similarities and one dies? What happens when both die? How do those left behind cope?