My MFA Poetry Thesis, May 2012

 (hard to reproduce the format here, but you'll get the drift. continuing to share what it is I do and have done with you.)

The Intelligence of Memory

Molly Daniels

© 2012

For all of us who live to the other side of silence.

“Memory is like            a

               shifting          collage,

             a narrative                          spun out of  scraps     and

             constructed        anew            

                              whenever  recollection       takes place.”

                   Kathleen McGowan

he tells me it’s obvious i’m inexperienced. i don’t tell him pushing my head under his sleeping bag is disconcerting.

i accuse the boy i’m dating of leaving so quickly after sex that he forgot his shoes. he tells me i’d insisted the night before that they were mine, and wore them home.

they wheel another college student into the ward. he’s chanting, Do not go gently into that good night! and i think bemusedly, i could do this for a while.

  

the poem i want to write has the word nipple in it   it won’t be taut or blushed   just nipple, right there   because you know how it tastes   the slight give of density between teeth and under the ply of your tongue

 when they knock on my dorm and pull me out of bed, i have to take my retainer out first.

She drops a carton of cereal. It splatters against the baseboards. She pauses, and begins to wail as though the o’s are all the things she cannot manage. I reach to the sink with a sudden glass and open the tap. Oxygen bubbles cloud it. I hold it out to her and she shakes her soggy head, It’s dirty. I tell her it’s just the bubbles. She hiccups and insists, No, it’s dirty. I fill another glass.

 months later, a friend will tell me the only coherent thing i said that day was, i only feel normal when i’m drunk.

my breath comes short   and shallow in gasps of clinging—No—clutching—No—manic tantrum thrashes—No!   i cannot let this go   i need this   them   his   i need you to make me better   i need you to make me feel better   adore me   touch me   writhe on top of me   so in that suspension   i can feel alive   writhe on top of me  so in that suspension   i can feel alive   your breath comes short  and shallow in gasps of clinging—Yes—clutching—Yes—manic tantrum thrashes—Yes!  malleate me   pound me   beat me out of myself   so i can be in the quiet   beat me out of myself    so i can be in the quiet

the other patients will tell me they assumed it was heroin because of the jutting hipbones.

and because neither of us know what we’re doing, i don’t know my discomfort is his finger in the wrong hole.

 my first time is an apology. he puts on his shoes when he’s done.

 he comes over at 3am sweating booze. it burns as he pushes in from behind.

 the scent of day lilies cloys the air. they're supposed to rot in dirt.

this could be anything you’d forget   or anything you remember   this could be the thing you’d always remember   but isn’t at all how you remember it   this could be the  experience you wish you had   the experience you did have   or the experience you’d wanted to have   but now that it’s happening   you’re wishing it were different   wish it were more   you wish you knew what came next 

 i’ve skidded out on just-damp pavement. the cutlass nose-deep in a copse of trees. i can’t get my fingers to steady around my cigarette. the hicktown cops make quite a show of marching me into their holding cell.

 My mother taught three special topics courses at a university in the 90s. Psychology of Fashion (special emphasis on fetish fashion); Barbie on the Couch, a Psychoanalytic Perspective (final projects produced several mutilated dolls); and Female Serial Killers (surprisingly few; generally preferring poison).

 She tells me she realized if she twisted just one more inch, she’d break his arm. He stutters from the time he is verbal.

crocuses like periscopes through snow   skeleton stakes of tomato plants   a brick
patio swims in a decade of oak and maple leaves

 We sit on a bench outside the outlet mall. She wears black pleather pants. I have a cigarette. She’d rather I didn’t but she smoked when she was my age. The other two are inside some men’s store. She asks how my summer away was and a cute boy walks by and looks toward us on the bench. She says that he’s cute. That she’s been emailing with a nineteen year old somewhere in the middle states. That she was going to buy a plane ticket to go out and see him. I don’t remember where. I’m glad to have the numbing thrum of adderall to push the din of rage and panic back behind my collarbone. At the last minute she decided not to go. I tell her not to hit on any of the guys I thought were cute too. She laughs. I examine the filter. My dad walks out of the store. 

 my lips travel down his body and freeze to a sudden stop at his waistband. flashbacks blind my retinas and i cling to his thigh, barely breathing in the dark. he tells me that it’s okay, that we can just have sex, instead.

 my mom later tells me she came to see me once, but i don’t remember. she tells me i was zonked out on meds, and her voice trails off, and she gets this terrified look in her eyes.

 my dad’s first wife, i was told, ended up in bellevue. now she lives in brooklyn.

 when getting honest about the amphetamines, my mom tells me her therapist insisted she come see him 7 days a week, or be committed.

 my therapist leans forward in earnest. you do know you’ve had a breakdown, right?

 i meet with a student who tells me not to take split-level poetry because all the under-grads write about is date rape – so i don’t tell him about the drunken carride from two strangers, later finding an earring twisted into my shirt, or being turned away from four Korean hospitals because rape is not an emergency.

i read an article on how to snag a man which suggests that women think about something naughty when out because women won’t pick up on it, but the men will – so, i imagine licking pre-cum from a cock, which provides a lascivious revolt against public decorum and not undamp panties.

but, in the unwalled house of my memory, these situations sometimes mix – and the salt sours, the armor rebuilds, and the currency of reality cripples.

i can’t let you be nice to me    you skim and caress and   i can’t take it   you are gentle and whisper   and   no   not here   there is nothing breathing here   just do it   take it   please don’t honor this   please  i am going to break   Please   kindness does not belong in here

 i hold my palm against all the objects i’ve piled in the center of my room and ask them each where they belong.

 i’ve removed the velvet cloak from my stuffed bunny. with my now-shaved head, we are both naked and new.

 he sounds like an impostor every time he recites the blessing over the shabbat candles. as if crossing the border of religion frees him of his past, or gives him access to ours.

 he hurls his words: you look like your mother. that night, i simply shave it all off.

i’m on that electric walkway at the airport. its moving along beneath me, but i’ve lost my footing, and its dragging me, scraping me apart as others stand so calmly heading toward their future.

 the doctor stares at his clipboard, a few pages up-turned in his hand. he glances vaguely

toward me – i hear there’s something about your hair?

 afterward, he tells me he wants to take me out, like to dinner. i ask why. he tells me he likes me, wants to get to know me. i stop answering his calls.

 my dad grips the arms of a green plastic chair. his knuckles are white. i’m not angry at you, he spits, i’m angry at your disease.

i cannot let this go   him   them   what will i be without this fractured electricity whirling around my body   who will i be without you to bring me to life   how will i know myself?   in the morning   i remember the Beatles.  i hear them deep within my story  and as i listen   i remember:  I love the Beatles   i love to laugh at my own jokes   i’d love to embrace fully   without savage tongues  or suspended reality  i find myself to be a woman   scared   scarred  and  beautiful.  and it is this constant   this one  unalterable  truth about myself   that enables me for one unguarded moment  to lean over the edge of uncertainty   to spread my arms   and fall in

 huddled on the closet floor, phone clutched to my ear, my friend tells me: i’m thinking
of checking out a meeting.

this is the feeling of your arm tight around my ribcage   this is the feeling of your thigh soft beneath mine   i sense my consciousness escaping   it’s not safe to be here   exposed   from so much more than clothes   this is the feeling of your heartbeat  gentle against my back   this is the feeling of your lips   pressed sleepy at my shoulder   i want to detach   to run away from myself   to leave my body  leave just two bodies   base  discardable   this is the feeling of your hand twining firmly into mine   this is the feeling of my body melting into yours   but i   am human   and you   are human   naked and safe   here  i breathe

this could be the time you get it right   the time you remember there is no right   this time you don’t wish it were any different   and you don’t come back for more.