His smile corner-cracked,
creases sticking, splinters
from a rough railing
I smooth with my hands,
little pincushion girl,
little bruises, broken toes,
his arm twisting mine behind me
like a socket wrench
tightening a stubborn bolt.
Girl who wants to make things
disappear: outline of my body,
sun back into its black hole,
words that accidentally
slip past barbed wire walls
of my mouth, journal shoved
between boxspring and baseboard,
all I guard and never say,
the songs my mother sang to me
when I was someone else,
a language stashed
among linen closet sheets.
Girl who cleans up quietly,
violence like a jacket
across the shoulders of the boy.
Girl who sees in double: boy,
boy + anger, boy + fist
wrapped around my hair and pulling
the bright air of the room, separated
into seed pods or punctuation marks,
boy who made me
a tree in sun, shiny-leaved,
room full of ladybugs flying,
walking up walls and windows,
flecks of red everywhere
I look. I come home in midnight rain
to find tree frogs clinging to the sides
of the house like a blessing on the place.
Girl of grit, I split rocks
for water, drink deep
from my own hands:
this April wind I rise,
throw windows wide and stand. I stand.
A tongue of fire sings above my head
Click here to read Jana-Lee Germaine on the origin of the poem.
Image by Inggrid Koe on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
Jana-Lee Germaine:
I’m finishing a manuscript that deals with my abusive first marriage and its aftermath –figuring out how to reclaim self and identity after an experience that tries vehemently to erase both. Part of the journey is talking about the abuse, and I needed a poem that fit into that space. The question became, how do I write the lived moment of abuse in a poem?
The answer, for me, was to write obliquely. I needed the cascading energy of long sentences with almost-narrative and lots of images, metaphors, and similes to carry the emotive content. The images needed to make sense on an intuitive level rather than on a linear narrative level because the experience of abuse is not something we can logically process and accept – instead, we’re simply trying to survive and make sense of a situation that doesn’t make sense and can only be survived by a sort of desperate primeval endurance. In terms of form, I loved how a tercet followed by a couplet felt a little off-balanced, a kind of irregular regularity, which is what the time period of the abuse was like.
I sat for weeks without writing a word and let the poem begin to develop in my subconscious while I kept my conscious mind open to what might trigger the poem. One day, the sparking images came – the disappearing sun, violence sitting like a jacket on his shoulders, and the list of broken things. I began freewriting phrases and images all in one big flow, let that first draft sit for a while for distance, and then I started the long process of revision. This poem went through 32 different revisions over five years until I arrived at this final one.
Jana-Lee Germaine is Senior Poetry Reader for Ploughshares and Social Media Manager for Presence. Publications include Nelle, Water-Stone Review, Poet Lore, Iron Horse Literary Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, MER & elsewhere. She earned an MFA from Emerson College and is on the Board of Trustees for her public library. www.janaleegermaine.com
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Amazingly gifted. You can feel every word deeply.