The Interstate Spills

Eileen Cleary:

“The Interstate Spills” is part of a larger manuscript, The Wild Pack of the Living, (Nixes Mate, 2024) which contemplates the abduction of a child from his hometown in Merced, California in 1972. When I was a teenager, Steven Stayner escaped and returned home after seven years missing, rescuing another boy in the process. To me, he was a hero because I had been seized from my family by the state, in what felt like a legally sanctioned abduction. I never thought to escape. My brother also went missing (stolen by his foster family) and he was lost to us for forty years.

This book holds Steven Stayner — that boy from Merced who has lived in my chest for forty years. Once a person has been forcefully taken, there is no going back to being fully among the living.

This poem considers Del Stayner, Steven’s father, and his despair. It explores simultaneity, and how the actions of each person affect others. Because Steven was kidnapped, Del relinquished his role as traditional father. Because Del and others are searching for Steven, his captor is on the run. Steven, meanwhile, is holding onto awful secrets “between stones in his pockets.”

This verse uses imagery rather than exposition to narrate.

As Del’s depression deepens, he becomes more fixated on his lost son, sees him everywhere, and grows less engaged with his other children. It feels like dying. A physical manifestation of death is the purplish mottling of skin occurring in the hours before one dies. “There might as well be asters in his/feet.”

The poem closes with what isn’t known yet to its subjects. For the time being, they are alive. Del cannot know that he will be reunited with his boy, only that the wind will carry itself through honeysuckle, that one more tomorrow has arrived, and sometimes the rain lets up.