Early Onset Alzheimer’s & Adam’s Hog
by Camille Hoover
Eckerd College
Camille Hoover is a senior at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, FL, but is originally from Greenville, SC. She is majoring in Religious Studies and Creative Writing with a minor in Literature. She plans to attend Union Theological Seminary in NYC starting in the fall of 2022 for her MA in Theological Studies. Camille enjoys reading, playing guitar, writing, and powerlifting in her free time. Her piece “Quarantea” was published in The Dewdrop in the summer of 2020.
Early Onset Alzheimer’s
You don’t make your biscuits anymore.
The honeyed taste of being a chubby
child was because of you.
I would wait for the butter to melt
into the soft breading of flour and oats.
You taught me there’s no point to rush
in life. Things only get better with butter.
Four forgotten children gathering now
around the table for biscuits is rare.
We would argue over sitting next to you
and your limitless laugh. Dad said a prayer
for food, for raiment, for life,
for opportunity, for friendship and fellowship.
Your smile followed, and I know you thanked
the Lord for giving you such a family.
But you didn’t care about the biscuits
or the prayer. You knew well
we were your whole faith.
Tell me, do you like the cold.
raw cauliflower the doctor makes us
feed you now? Oh, to make you feel happy
in a moment again. Each one passing
holds everything you know.
I remember well the biscuits on the table,
and falling asleep when you rubbed my arms,
and the story of meeting dad in a bar,
and riding your back into the unfamiliar ocean,
and pulling you on roller coasters because it was funny
only to hear you scream, and learning what it means
to love from watching that smile.
Adam’s Hog
in memory of my very healthy relationships
I have a boyfriend, a hick of sorts,
and I’ve known his hogs
in filth and dead flies.
They often obsess over corn and beans
soaking in a bucket hung
by my tensing arm.
He taught me to bend over
and pour the slop in the trough.
Down, I stop
to see them long and
long for a hog
to love me for a moment.
But then Adam, a perpetual hick,
places his calloused palm near
a hog’s tail,
demented with the mania of owning it.
Interview with the Poet
1. What was your inspiration for this piece?
This might seem like an obvious answer, but my mom was my inspiration for my poem, “Early Onset Alzheimer’s.” It’s a piece about grief and mourning and remembering the happy moments that can really make you so sad. It has been hard to watch her fight against Alzheimer’s over the past couple years and I wanted to capture how life with my mom was before. “Adam’s Hog” is a reflection on human relationship. This colonial mindset of ownership is fascinating to me. It manifests in the way we treat the earth, non-human animals, and often other humans.
2. What is your creative process? (How do you go about writing or creating?)
As I go through my day, I’ll often see or hear or feel something and think to myself that’s going to be a poem. So I write it down usually in the notes app on my phone. I return to it later and write all that I can remember. From there, I rewrite the poem. A lot. Until it turns into something that I can enjoy reading.
3. What are some influences on your artistic process?
My writing is often about others. My relationships to them and the parts of our relationships that I feel I need to cherish and preserve through words on a page. My faith has also always played a huge role in my thinking and writing. I see God in my everyday, making it hard not to let Him seep into my writing as well. Plus, biblical imagery is some of the best out there. Why not play with that?
4. Is there anything more you’d like our readers/viewers to know about you or your work?
It’s not always easy to write, but for some reason I still love it. I have a lot of thoughts about a lot of things and there is no telling what is going to happen next in my literary imagination.