Olly Olly Oxen Free

Susan Fuchtman:
I wrote “Olly Olly Oxen Free” a few years ago, looking out my home office window at verdant suburbia. I lived in Cincinnati metro at the time. The first line, “We need a good soaking rain,” is the kind of thing people say, and for some reason, sitting at that desk that day, that’s where I started. I don’t plan my writing and was as surprised as anyone when earth worms, soaked and struggling after the rain, reminded me of hide-and-seek with my sister. The ending changed a few times—the story of a lifetime with a sister is difficult to capture in any number of lines, and I finally decided on the vague and broad last couplet. I didn’t use any punctuation, but rather let the line breaks pace the poem, and used ampersands rather than “and” for speed and to keep those “ands” small. I recently worked on a final polish of the poem with poetry coach and editor, Tara Skurtu. We made a couple of line break changes in the body of the poem, but most of our work was on the ending: we removed a line “all those years ago” that was before the last couplet, took out a second “before” that was at the start of the last line, and moved the ampersand from the end of the penultimate line to the beginning of the last line.