Reincarnating the Swan
After George Orwell’s and Joan Didion’s “Why I Write”
The pond is quieter than usual, devoid of any sound of wildlife. A perfect dawn sky cracks open with the sun, but it is still cool enough that fog suspends itself over the warm water. A swan circles in algae, chasing the ripples of his wake. Over and over and over. He is grieving.
I am always too late to a scene, arriving with the fallout. I first heard about Manlius’s swans in a TikTok comment section, where users were talking into the abyss about the tragedy that occurred. My writing always begins with a realization of terror: the alarming flinch of a man, impending anxiety about having to shave the entire length of my legs, a dream about my father that I cannot shake. When I read about what happened in Manlius, the only thing I could have possibly done was write through it. There was no other option but to create a space for my grief.
Police are called when the town’s inhabitants discover the flute of a swan’s neck; her beautiful, cold skull. The rest of her body is missing and will never be found. A trail of jet black blood meanders to where an interloper—or three—vaulted over the fence the night prior. The cygnets are gone, and still her mate circles in an endless loop.
I wondered—for however many cumulative hours it took me to write the first draft of a poem—about how long it took the citizens of Manlius to realize that Faye, the swan, was missing. In India, 1.3 million women went “missing” in a three-year period. The impact of women on this world is so grand, yet they can simply fade away into the noise. Faye was a swan, but she felt as vibrant and whole to me as my own mother.
In her book, Beasts of Burden, scholar and activist Sunaura Taylor writes:
There has been an urgent need among dehumanized populations (including disabled people) to challenge animalization and claim humanity. As urgent and understandable as these challenges are, it is important to ask how we can reconcile the brutal reality of human animalization with the concurrent need to challenge the devaluing of animals and even acknowledge our own animality.
Taylor centers her argument on the world’s disabled population, but her words are applicable in a broader sense. The human-animal dichotomy that we’ve constructed throughout history is one of the biggest threats to liberation. We’ve confined ourselves to our humanness, thinking it meant superiority. I want my writing to be the red string that links human and animal, that asks the hunter to question himself through the scope of his own rifle. I want to liberate the devalued. I want Faye to live again. I want her spilled blood to be just as important as my own, for our blood to be indistinguishable.
Twenty-six minutes away, cygnets singe against heat lamps in a Salina pet store. They are completely hungry, starved of proper food and their mother’s warmth. When they are found, wildlife specialists warn animal control that their father has no room for them in his heart. He has marooned himself, lost inside the shell of grief, and will attack if he sees his babies. It is hard to get close enough to remove him, but animal control manages. For weeks, the pond remains empty: a bodiless graveyard.
I would be lying if I said that I only wrote for the betterment of others. That is too much of an altruistic answer. I am selfish, of course I am. “Vain, selfish and lazy” as Orwell claims all writers are. Faye had four cygnets. I am the oldest of my mother’s four children. She used to leave us for work just as the sun rose, and I would bang my fists against our green storm door, crying so hard that I could draw a sad face in the condensation my breath left on the cool metal. I think I am always trying to draw her back into my narrative, materialize her in front of me. She went to Haiti sixteen times to build a school after the 2010 earthquake, hid in the dry heat from her abusive husband while we waited for her to return. I cannot help but identify with the awkward, gray cygnets and their heartache. There is nothing I can do to breathe life back into Faye. But I can make sure that there is always a space for her to ghost in, a doorway to linger in. I want my mother, always. I imagine Faye’s cygnets feel the same way.
Through a wall of limited English, a boy on the cusp of being a man confesses. How the blade glinted under the moon and burned up in his hand; how his two friends waded into the dark night and pounced like cats, pinning the swan’s wings and opening her ripe body; how she startled with terror, twisting her neck into a sickly knot. He cries when he remembers how the swan tasted, when he remembers his aunt plucking her alabaster feathers. He realizes the terror in what he has done and wants to walk backward, rewind completely.
In this narrative, I tried not to demonize the boy—despite my initial desire to. My poem reads: “I do not wish to denounce men / I hate the blade.” Earlier in my writing journey, I wrote entirely to demand guilt. My own or someone else’s. It did not matter. I wrote stanza after stanza about my father’s every misstep, and then about my own. I do not regret it, but it was neither sustainable nor realistic. The boy who killed Faye was a refugee from Myanmar. I don’t want the entire weight of this crime placed on his shoulders for multiple reasons, such as the ways in which he had been acculturated while growing up in war-torn Myanmar, but mainly because the violence he was able to carry out is not unique to him. The boy was a cog in a machine, and he chose, unfortunately, to keep it running. This machine’s hum is silent but I want all of my poems’ walls to amplify the sound until it can be heard. Faye was a mute swan. It is hard not to find that symbolic.
Cameras are installed months after the swan dies, just when her cygnets return to the pond. Through a grainy film, the cygnets grow into their stark beauty. Electronic eyes wait for the next set of armed young men.
I feel the same way about writing as I do about taking a bath: despite every ounce of logic, I am always surprised when I do not feel cleaner afterwards. I continue in spite of this. Faye’s story unravels before me, curling into itself, repeating itself. The same narrative is reinvented time and time again—new tendons, new blades, warmer blood, different women. I write because I know how something will end. I write in search of a switch rail. In Manlius, a town committee raises funds to place security cameras around their pond. Hundreds of miles away, the poet in my soul imagines a world where there is no fence. Faye flies from pond to pond, hissing at whoever dares to go near. Maybe the only way to make something real is to write it into existence.
Mollie McMullan is a 2025 graduate from SUNY Geneseo. During her time there, she thoroughly enjoyed her work as one of Gandy Dancer‘s managing editors for the 2024-25 school year. Gandy Dancer taught her to be experimental, to be incredibly discerning, but most importantly, to value her own voice. She is attempting to start a literary journal at the day program she works for, and feels immense gratitude for every second she spent working on her beloved Gandy Dancer.