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2020 Mondays, Calls from your Mother, and All the Things We've Lost Emilee Anne Wigglesworth

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COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! MONDAYS, CALLS FROM YOUR

MOTHER, AND ALL THE THINGS

WE’VE LOST

! ! ! ! ! ! ! By

EMILEE WIGGLESWORTH ! ! ! ! ! ! A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in the Major

Degree Awarded: Summer, 2021 ! ! ! ! ! ! The members of the Defense Committee approve the thesis of Emilee Wigglesworth defended on November 20, 2020 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Dr. David Kirby, Thesis Director ! ! ! ! !

! ! Ms. Carrie Ann Baade, Outside Committee Member ! ! ! ! !

! ! Dr. James Kimbrell, Committee Member ! ! ! ! !

! ! Dr. Russ Franklin, Committee Member ! !

! 2 ANGELS LANDING, DEVIL’S TOWER ...... 4 NOVEMBER 3RD, 2019 ...... 5 I FOUND THE CLEARING IN THE FOREST WHERE GOD KEEPS ALL THE BRIDGES YOU CAN CROSS INTO HEAVEN, BUT THEY’RE ROTTED AWAY ...... 6 OUTSIDE THE LIBRARY WAITING TO MEET WITH MY FRIEND, MARISA, TO TALK ABOUT WHAT WE MISSED OVER HOLIDAY BREAK ...... 8 I SAW HEAVEN WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN, FAINT, AND DAYS FROM DROPPING TO THE FLOOR, HALF-DEAD ...... 9 IF I AM LIKE MY MOTHER, THEN YOU ARE LIKE YOUR FATHER ...... 11 CYCLES ...... 12 FEBRUARY AND THE THIRTEEN MONDAYS I’VE LIVED WITHOUT HIM ...... 13 TRANSLUSCENT SKIES ON A RAINY AFTERNOON IN MARCH ...... 14 STOMPING IN ANTHILLS AND ALL THE REASONS HE SHOULDN’T BE WITH ME ...... 15 MAKING FROGS EXPLORE THE SEWER; DROWNING FOR THE CAUSE OF CURIOUS SEVEN- YEAR-OLDS ...... 16 WARNING SOUTH FLORIDIANS: FALLING IGUANAS ...... 17 RESILLIENCE: A CASE STUDY ...... 19 GIRLS TREMBLING IN THE SUNSET ...... 20 STARING OUT THE WINDOW OF THE CITY BUS ON A RAINY EVENING ...... 21 BLACK DEATH ...... 22 CHAPPED LIPS, PRESSED THIGHS, AND SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNINGS IN EARLY JULY ...... 23 MONDAYS, CALLS FROM YOUR MOTHER, AND ALL THE THINGS WE’VE LOST ...... 24 I WISH YOU HAD BEEN AT THE MITSKI CONCERT ...... 26 TO CARL AND VICTOR, WHO WERE THE BROTHERS I NEVER HAD ...... 27 THE PEARL ...... 29 LIPSTICK STAINS IN YOUR EMPTY BED ...... 30 BABY BIRDS FREE-FALLING FROM THEIR NEST ...... 31 PRESSED FLOWERS, AFTERNOON SHOWERS, AND ALL THE REASONS I CAN’T GET OUT OF BED IN THE MORNING ...... 32 SUSPENDED IN THE SKY WITH YOU, LAST SPRING ...... 33 I WILL SPEND THE REST OF MY LIFE LONGING FOR EVERYTHING THAT COULD HAVE BEEN ...... 34 POEM WITH A SHORT TITLE ...... 35 THE FIRST TIME VISITING THE HOUSE YOU GREW UP IN ...... 36 STORMY, THE EMOTIONAL SUPPORT RABBIT ...... 37 IF I CLOSE MY EYES, I CAN FEEL YOUR HAND ON MY CHEEK ...... 38 WAITING FOR THE CALL FROM BEYOND ...... 39

! 3 ANGELS LANDING, DEVIL’S TOWER

I am not a monolith. I am not a stone that stands firmly in place despite the weather, despite the erosion that casts a shadow on the way things were, but only in their beginning. When we unravel the pain, where does it leave us standing but with a hand full of pebbles and a collection of sixty-four pennies? You cannot carve me into a statue of beauty and grace, for you have never given me the lips with which to speak and to kiss the women who showed me what it means to love someone that won’t ask you to be a rock or an amethyst or the pink chalcedony I picked out and she bought me, on the day after he touched me and stripped away my skin; tapping lightly on a breast that had been chiseled from the breast of a mother and her mother before that, both bearing witness to men in the pursuit of pleasure sans pain. What we take lies before us in the dim moonlight, watching only for the sake of watching. Eyes of judgement shall be cast on you for what you want, what you steal, what you can never return because it has been dirtied by the tobacco underneath your nails and the stench of blood filling your lungs– with each breath you are drowning, but blood does not simmer, it boils, bubbles, and coats your voice until you are begging for ice that will not melt: a rock so pure that when you saw it, you were sure it had to be crystal. I am a woman who has been carved from the canyons and chasms so deep, they do not echo. Their screams into my belly do not escape into the windless nights of December, I carry them with me, and their cries go unanswered because I am not a monolith. I am not a stone that stands firmly in place.

! 4 NOVEMBER 3RD, 2019

Sometimes I cruelly think it would be better if we had never become friends, then I would not have this pain of losing him.

! 5 I FOUND THE CLEARING IN THE FOREST WHERE GOD KEEPS ALL THE BRIDGES YOU CAN CROSS INTO HEAVEN, BUT THEY’RE ROTTED AWAY

I am looking to find the way past the bridges and the openings through the leaves in the sycamore trees,

where the sunlight floods through and I can see his shadow waiting to dance with me in the joyous reunion of love, taken, quickly

without remorse, or even a moment to whisper: goodbye, don’t go, I want you, only you, and I will keep you alive

through my undying adoration. May I cross to the other side where the brook runs over the smoothed stones or is He standing, arms crossed, a silent

watcher – making sure I do not step forward onto the molded planks of honey-colored cedar wood?

It has blackened from weakness and pond water; I am too afraid to ask if there is another way across the sloshing

waters to meet my lost friend. What can I do when I am choking; my face turned blue from the loss, or worse, the act of losing? God,

I know you can see me on the phone, answering the same call every morning before sunrise– his mother and the single tear she shed

telling me her son, oh her beloved son, is dead. It is five a.m. and I am waking to the ringing and the dread and then stumbling through my kitchen, grasping

for the countertops so I do not slip through the cracks in our faux wooden floor. I am gasping for the air from our conditioner and crawling

to my roommate’s bedroom, dragging my legs, my torso; inching forward until I can reach for the arm of the couch and learn to stand again, like a calf first

! 6

finding its footing on the pasture where its mother grazes and doesn’t have to think about how she’d muster the strength to chew grass after the loss of her baby. He called her,

said that weekend was the happiest he’d ever been, ever will be, and how do you stand on two feet when every bone in your body has snapped in three, for there’s nothing

to make her whole again, that’s what she said to me over the phone to let me know the toxicology report came back clean, and we are reminded of his responsibility, like we didn’t know

he was perfect– so kind, his father has likened him to Jesus in his eulogy that I downloaded to a hard drive on my computer because I got stuck five hours from the funeral without a ride

or a license to drive and I got drunk instead and my friends said it’s the happiest they’d ever seen me, which I know means he’s here, hand on my shoulder, waiting patiently while

God constructs me a bridge with sanded birch wood and the finest screws so I never find myself falling in front of my roommate’s door, wailing, waiting for her

to unlock the latch and let me in.

! 7 OUTSIDE THE LIBRARY WAITING TO MEET WITH MY FRIEND, MARISA, TO TALK ABOUT WHAT WE MISSED OVER HOLIDAY BREAK

The girl sitting in front of me looks like me from behind, or at least, on this particular Monday when we both decided to wear a purple bandana in our curly hair– hers that drapes down her back, and mine that Hannah just cut. My mom made a point to tell me it was uneven, but I think she just hates when I cut my hair short, probably because women with short hair look gay, or in my case, are.

I heard your parents didn’t take the whole, uh, likin’ girls thing well. My uncle picked me up on New Year’s Eve before the pineapple even dropped and signified the mark of yet another year in this godforsaken town. I didn’t even know your folks went to church, ain’t ever seen ‘em go in the 27 years I’ve known ‘em. I wasn’t surprised with your grandma, but I thought they wouldn’t care about that kind of thing. I’m not surprised, or at least, it doesn’t surprise me when my parents cry at the thought of me marrying a woman because it’s not a real marriage, who cares what the court decided in 2015? Marriage is sacred, and those fucking homos shouldn’t get special privileges just because they’ve got something wrong in their head;

wires crossed or the need to be different, or special, or something… and oh look at me, isn’t anyone paying attention when I kiss a girl because Tanner wouldn’t love me back? It’s like my mother says: she got screwed over by men and decided to be gay now and after 5 years Abby and Sierra are getting a divorce and Abby is dating men again, so I guess that means she must be right– sexuality is certainly black and white. I hope she doesn’t cross her fingers every time my future wife and I have a fight because she thinks it means I will come to my senses and be straight again, so she can finally stop talking shit at the dinner table with her mother and sisters and their husbands about her oldest daughter who is definitely going to Hell.

! 8 I SAW HEAVEN WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN, FAINT, AND DAYS FROM DROPPING TO THE FLOOR, HALF-DEAD

I stopped looking up to my mother when I was twelve years old and you don’t realize how that affects your perception as a little girl, who is supposed to want to model herself after her mother but instead, wants to be nothing like the monster she’s grown to resent. A moody middle schooler with a nose for anything rotten and

Scott was the whole fucking carton of eggs uncracked long past their expiration date. I remember scowling at him from afar at a carnival.

I watched him talk to my mother, this man, she’d let into her and my father’s bed. Sometimes he tried to be kind with his snake eyes and silver tongue but he never made good on his promise to fix my dresser, and now whenever I go home I am reminded of all the hatred I put in that dark mahogany wood

and its’ missing handle. The drawers slide out from underneath my bed with the hot pink sheets that still have stains of blood from the time I would bleed so much I almost died -- and no, I’m not one to exaggerate-- it was as if someone were dumping buckets out of me for five to seven days straight, except once when it did not stop at the end of the week and instead my insides continued to purge themselves until I was pale in the face, blue in the lips, my fingertips shaking, and my mind racing as I felt myself begin to slip. I was spinning milkshakes when I began leaning over the machine, my vision spotting with white; I had never seen the lights get so bright.

A co-worker I didn’t like caught me as I began to topple and suddenly I owed her my life as she led me to the bathroom where I locked myself in a stall to cry and watch as my body pumped itself empty of red, red,

nothing but red. My manager asked me if I was diabetic or something and I said, “no, I don’t think so” and then nibbled on the stale crackers he brought me to eat. I dialed my mother, tears still in my eyes and feeling the eyes of my managers watching me call three times with no answer.

Do you need me to find you a ride? “No, I’m fine, I’ll just try one more time.” But I didn’t call my mother, instead I rang Carl and said, “please can you come get me, my mom isn’t

! 9 answering, I almost fainted out at work and– And so, he stopped, got me, picked me up in his gray sedan, and asked me, are you okay? We drove in silence while I caught my breath and shoved each tear back in my eye, one at a time. He said, do you need something to eat and I knew I didn’t, but we went to McDonald’s anyway-- got me a sundae and small fry.

! 10 IF I AM LIKE MY MOTHER, THEN YOU ARE LIKE YOUR FATHER

There are ways to quiet the mind if you find yourself harping on your first love and all the ways he didn’t love you: Dig your toes into the carpet, clench and unclench your fists, press your palms firmly on your thighs, and maybe even try yoga– or meditation… or watching your anxieties fly by on the freeway all while you sip on a slushie from the gas station in a lawn chair; sneak a look from the top of your shades like you couldn’t even be bothered to care about the way the wind messes up your hair. I’ll tie my mane

into a ponytail or ask my mother to braid it for me, all while she complains she does not know how. Really, she is afraid of the stray curls and the bumps she cannot manage to smooth. Once he told me I was like my mother to hurt me and maybe I should have told him he inherited his coldness from his father to hurt him all the same. I sat out by the fountain, listening to the water run where kids come to turn twenty-one and I would’ve liked to have seen him get thrown, soaking all the hairs atop his head, grinning and laughing at all the people he now calls friend.

Surely, we will find ourselves sat across the table in some run-down diner years from now where the waitress will assume we’re together, just like they always did when we stopped to eat, never wanting to go back home– only this time I will be the one to feign disgust at the thought of your skin on mine and you will feel silly for hoping I’d love you still and maybe I will, but I am tired of showing my affection-- like letting you see my hand in Poker, of course you always win. I bought sunglasses that send your own reflection back to you so my eyes will stop telling you I dream about you still.

! 11 CYCLES

Perhaps that is just the nature of rain– to fall. Every nightmare I have ends up exactly the same; I find myself in danger, in an unknown time, place, even dimension, and I am being chased as I make vain attempts to escape. I come to find that I have been running in circles, and the buildings I am cutting through are just interconnected hallways and endless corridors. Divine evil is always looking for me, manifested in all the people I know, fear, and loathe; crooked politicians, abusive lovers, and a hundred different versions of my mother. There tends to be an overwhelming sense of helplessness as I bear witness to the sins of those that will not / cannot / do not change.

My parents are planning to paint over the baby pink walls in my bedroom because they told my aunt, it’s not like she’ll be coming back, and I wonder if they’ll move my bed to make space for a home gym, or storage so they can finally fit a car inside the garage, or maybe an office just like the one we had in our first house on Linwood street. What’s the point in saving boxes of report cards, drawings in crayons, book reports, and valentines from first graders, if you do not watch what those mementos of a girl grow up to be? You can’t love a daughter if you only love what you thought she should be. But whimsy is for queers and what kind of woman will you be if you don’t seek the attention of men, their dominance, and their protection from all the other men who think they deserve your attention? Recognizing a wolf in sheep’s clothing is easy

as long as you know what a real sheep’s wool looks like. I know now that no achievement, no level of success will ever be enough if attaining a mother’s love, real love, is the end game. Was the wicked stepmother mean because she forced Cinderella to clean? No, the cruelty lied in her ability to manipulate and control how the girl in the glass slippers and gown saw herself. Make others feel small so you feel big, until the mirror, mirror on the wall tells you that maybe you’re not so beautiful after all. With my nose in a book, fairytale, dream, fantasy, now I wonder why so much of my childhood was spent trying to escape reality. They only see what they want to see, that’s what Marisa said when I asked how they could have missed the signs of what I tried (and failed) to hide— not just my propensity for girls and their desire, but for my fear, my paralyzing fear.

! 12 FEBRUARY AND THE THIRTEEN MONDAYS I’VE LIVED WITHOUT HIM

Four months– that’s when I find the sobering realization sets in: he’s dead, not coming back, and won’t get older with me. His father is the closest I get to knowing what he would’ve looked like when we were grown like our parents. I talked to his roommate on the phone and we debated whether he died the night of the third or the morning of the fourth. And I guess it doesn’t matter, but when I went to bed on Sunday, he was still alive, and I fell asleep thinking

I would see him Monday when he got back.

! 13 TRANSLUCENT SKIES ON A RAINY AFTERNOON IN MARCH

There’s a storm out my window– the rain whizzes past in a flurry, the wind is heavy, and each tree sways and threatens to uproot itself. I watch as the downpour blankets my city in a gray haze, making the cars disappear as they speed by on the street below my balcony. The smudge on my glasses reflects in such a way to reveal a rainbow appearing before the rain has been given the chance to come to a sudden halt. Thunder drowns out my stereo, playing a band Tanner showed me on one of our road trips back to the town where we grew up. I make it a point not to visit these days. When I go, I am a ghost, watching a childhood

I have tried to run from. Sometimes I think the memories I want to forget are sewn into my eyelids, playing on an infinite loop. I see him in his home hunting me down, a toy gun in hand, his movements only to be described as a prowl. I hid behind his dad’s lawnmower in the garage, my heart racing, and one hand clasped over my mouth to silence each shallow breath. I waited until he had made his way around the side of the house to make a break for his brother’s room where the rest of the weapons were. With my back

to the door, I fumbled to load the plastic yellow gun with foam bullets. That’s when he struck; pointed his gun at me, and I shrieked -- the bullets bounced off my temple. He advanced, making his way into the closet. I felt my heels knock into the wall behind me and I knew then he had backed me into a corner. With nowhere to go, my eyes met his– we were toe to toe, my back pressed against the wall, and I could feel his warm breath on my cheek. For a moment, I was sure he would kiss me, but in a panic I looked down to the collar of his shirt, no longer able to look into his blue eyes that I found myself swimming in.

He peeled himself from me and we went back to the kitchen where we would pretend nothing had happened out of sorts. Your mother came home with groceries and said, why don’t you stay for dinner? I said, I would love to, but I have to get home soon and you looked relieved.

As afternoon lulls into evening, the clouds dissipate, and the trees hold their ground. I can hear the robins chirping through the panes on my window; I am tempted to invite them inside to sing me a lullaby. I know they would grow restless over time, confined to a small bedroom with powder pink sheets, so instead I watch them flit between branches and make conversation with the blue jays.

I hum the tune to a song I learned in choir, imagining the high ceilings of the Church and the stained-glass images of Mary and The Lord, standing hand-in-hand. I am stood still on the low heel of my black pumps, resisting the urge to reach for the pearls wrapped around my neck. My lips come together to form an o and I sing the word alone, alone in the night on a dark hill with pines around me, spicy and still.

! 14 STOMPING IN ANTHILLS AND ALL THE REASONS HE SHOULDN’T BE WITH ME

The only thought that seems to orbit my head when his tongue is on my neck– I know I will break his heart so, I wonder how I can reduce the calamity of my foot on the anthill, sending families running scattered through the grass and the weeds and the fields of daisies that are beautiful, but not home, and I find that I am most in love with the people I can never have, whether because they don’t want me or because they are buried six feet under the ground. I am worried I do not feel

the way that a woman is meant to feel when he asks to worship me, down on his knees, like I am his queen and I think she must love every drone that carries the crumbs that will build her kingdom and feed her domain. She only learned to know love as domestic devotion. My father drove my mother around town every day for years when she was too afraid to have her hands wrapped around the steering wheel or around his neck, because riding shotgun is fun until another man kisses you, with passion, at sunset; full view of the ocean and knowledge that you could run away from this life and pretend you don’t know the woman you knew. I would like to toss my t-shirts in a bag and throw it over my shoulder, tied around a stick, like a real runaway

and when they see me, they will know I have left something behind. I am not a good woman, I have only loved the grandeur of a romance with a man who studies the art of being who he is not. I did not know him but I was enthralled by the thought that I knew him better than all the other people who thought they knew him too. He let me ride shotgun every morning and every afternoon, and on the way to our hometown, for five hours sitting in his presence - - watching the trees blur through the darkening window.

! 15 MAKING FROGS EXPLORE THE SEWER; DROWNING FOR THE CAUSE OF CURIOUS SEVEN-YEAR-OLDS

I myself am hell; nobody’s here and it is lonely in the temple between my eyes– unblinking and staring for so long I’m never quite sure what I’m looking at. The world blurs around me and my friends ask where I have gone. Where have you gone? Will you be coming back soon? Can I go with you past the snow-capped mountains and the rushing rivers? I will stay cool, I will look at you coolly, and you will agree that I am a cool girl; the one who can disappear for days or weeks and never move from my position, legs crisscrossed on the couch. A cat sleeps with me, lays across my chest, and listens to my breathing, all while I listen to her purrs burying themselves in my breasts. Her eyes are bright blue and cloudless in the summer sun. Sometimes I wish I would melt in the heat and children could play, jumping in the puddles of my flesh and blood; their joyous screams a reminder of the way I saw the world as a girl, my hair bouncing in the wind, and the grass the greenest it has ever been. I remember the oak tree with the large trunk and I tried to wrap my arms around it, my pinkies coming together on the other side, so I ran as fast as I could in circles, hopping over roots and anthills– wanting to be everywhere at once. When we were little, we collected frogs and sent them down the sewer in homemade submarine; only hoping for some great adventure.

! 16 WARNING SOUTH FLORIDIANS: FALLING IGUANAS!

Did you know that in freezing weather, Iguanas fall out of trees? And don’t worry, they don’t die; they’re just stunned from the sudden change of perfect beach weather to— oh fuck, you didn’t turn on the heater last night and now the apartment is freezing, well 66, but it’s all the same when you’re shivering under your weighted blanket and you realize you didn’t kick off your socks in your sleep weather. The iguanas are dramatic, in my opinion. Haven’t they seen all the frat boys in gym shorts and a hoodie because it’s not even that cold and what kind of pussy-man wears pants? A boy in my class ran past me in the hall, shivering so, I lamented about the cold which I think in Florida, might be a crime and he pointed to his thin grey sweats and said they were the warmest / only pair of pants he owned.

Can you imagine strolling through your neighborhood passing under the wrong tree, and then suddenly a twenty-pound lizard falling from the sky? Or the heavens, to be honest you never saw which because you were too busy

trying to button your jacket before your fingers got cold and you had to shove them back in your pockets; you hoped no one noticed you pushing your glasses up on your nose because you hadn’t gotten them tightened in over a year.

I would like to die via falling iguana; if I were to die from a hit to the head by a frozen reptile I bet I would make the news, and they’d call it a tragedy because what poor fool gets knocked out, just in passing under a tree? They would say my timing was incredible and what are the odds of all the trees in South Florida I got caught wrong time? wrong place? And I think my mother would hold a grudge for those bastards – she’d campaign to eradicate all the fucking lizards in the state, even though it’s not their fault someone couldn’t take care

! 17 of their exotic pet in the 60’s. He’s been running around the bayous and the swamps, making babies so he doesn’t have to be lonely ever since. Can you blame iguanas for invading our perfect beach town just like the tourists and the snowbirds who like to come here before the ocean rises and swallows us, iguanas included, whole?

! 18 RESILLIENCE: A CASE STUDY

Resilience, it’s the word my therapist, Erin, uses to describe me; it’s slightly more poetic than strong, which is the other word that a lot of people have used to describe me. The dictionary defines resilience as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” That’s me, the girl with elasticity in her bones, the girl who loses things and loses things and loses things and doesn’t think she could lose any more things, then does - - I am the girl who doesn’t miss a session of group, even on the Monday that her friend dies in a car crash, a week before his 21st birthday. Celebration turning to mourning to grief to celebration to grief and grief and grief and will I ever stop wishing I could bring him back from the dead? The feeling of loss is sickening; it lodges itself in your jaw and you begin to wonder if you’re speaking, or if your mouth is doing nothing more than moving in the shape of what you could have sworn words were like, before you entered the worst days of your life. The day he died - - words left me, I could not put pen to paper, or my fingers on a keyboard, I thought maybe I would never be able to write again. The only thing I managed to get out in the notes of my phone that night at 7:25, before I would eventually fall asleep in the exhaustion of my grief, was a singular sentence: “last thing we did together was read my poetry.”

It’s the pretending that’s hardest, on the dates with nice boys on Wednesday afternoons and having to smile, all while thinking, I might never love another man that isn’t Earle. That’s the problem with writing; I’m always doing it, even when I’m not physically doing it, because my eyes are searching for words, for stories, for lines to use in my poetry. Moments start to become fodder for my non-fiction; I’ve stopped looking into his eyes or listening to him tell stories, but instead I am observing from above: the two of us sat at a coffee shop, talking fondly of a professor we both admire, and then him mentioning the park that Earle and I were supposed to go to on a date, and me watching myself - - trying to watch him, but instead looking past the side of his head, over his left ear, and noticing my lack of focus, focusing instead on his nose, and the way it suited his face, but then thinking back again to the park that I still haven’t been to visit.

I am gone before I have even walked through the door. I am elsewhere in the oasis I’ve created, picking petals off the memories of love that I’ve collected -- right next to the sorrow and belly-aching grief. What’s good poetry that doesn’t make you want to rip off your skin and pull out all your teeth? I am a collector of trinkets, anything I can remember from my dreams, and the way the sunlight floods into my room through the blinds. Poems are not the only things that contain poetry– any good poet will tell you they’re just trying to document the poetry that makes itself present in the swirling of a tea bag in boiling water, or the bruising on an overripe banana, or in the quiet hallway of a school building when most everyone has already gone home. Most often, language is an insufficient means of describing these moments that only present themselves if you are listening.

! 19 GIRLS TREMBLING IN THE SUNSET

I have seen it: the edge of the universe, where the ocean streams into the stratosphere. It is easy to find when you are young and the layer of doom wrapped around Earth curls at the edges. I pulled back the curtain to reveal every answer to every question I’ve ever asked and every question I will ask, before I know I even want to ask it. I found it when I was a girl, playing in a backyard somewhere far from the city– the only lights to guide me were in the inky black sky, littered with twinkling stars and lightning bugs. We were visiting my mother’s childhood friend; I imagine them giggling, running through the grass and trees towards the place where greatness unfurls. Their pigtails tied up with satin ribbon, the sunlight making the freckles on their cheeks glow.

! 20 STARING OUT THE WINDOW OF THE CITY BUS ON A RAINY EVENING

I caught myself thinking of you on the 7’oclock bus– the sun had set and the gray clouds which had been suspended lazily in the sky since noon, finally opened up above the city. The bus was cold and the windows had fogged over, I peered through the raindrops on glass to watch the bricks blend into one another. Keeping count of stops in my head, I mouthed the numbers to feel the press of my lips together in the silence of a bus with three riders. The 7’oclock bus is my favorite bus to ride. It’s the last of the night and there is the anticipation of a driver who knows he only has to complete one more loop before he can go home. You took a photograph of me once in the summer when I was coming down the stairs to see you. I like to remember us this way: me, rushing down three flights from my apartment, eager to take my place in the passenger seat of the same car you’ve been driving since high school, and you, wanting to capture me when I don’t know you are watching me; always hoping you might be.

! 21 BLACK DEATH

I have attached myself to your coattails and I smile helplessly as you stumble over what you want to say to me about yourself. And I have liked to look at you from the side when I can see how far your nose reaches off your face. I noticed that yours comes to a point

in the semblance of a triangle. My eyes have wandered to your lips that flush a cherry red when you smile at me while I stumble over my words all the same. May I-? Are you-? Sorry if I- and I don’t mean to make any assumptions but if you’d be interested, perhaps you could

trace circles on my skin singing about pockets full of posies. We can reminisce about holding hands as children and skipping together around and around until we fall to the ground in our laughter and ignorance. Death is on our fingertips and the tip of our tongue, but we live until the plague

takes kisses, takes touch, and whatever it deems is enough. I will only give in, to the outstretched hand of God when he shows me what it means to find peace at the helm of her hips. Falling in love in solitude is easy, but cultivating it when your toes accidentally brush under the table is a game

for fools and romantics. I am both and I wonder when I will find the Jack of spades and overgrown gardens— I asked my father why he was pulling the daises from the yard and he said, these are just weeds disguised as flowers. I find it easier to forgive their deception when I remember that weeds root and grow

the same as any other plant, blind to the selfishness of their nature.

! 22 CHAPPED LIPS, PRESSED THIGHS, AND SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNINGS IN EARLY JULY

The sky was blue until it wasn’t. You craned your neck to look out my window at the rain shaken trees. A gust of wind blew past the panes and I was sure the shove could knock me to the concrete floor. I would like to have scraped knees and carpet-burnt elbows again— the gashes of red, patched lazily by band-aids peeling at the edge. You only get so long to be a child before you realize you haven’t been a child for so long.

Pop a bottle of champagne, it’s a celebration; you made it another trip around the sun. The memories fall like dominoes, toppling over one another, insisting to be traced back to the first piece to drop. It is hard to stand each domino on its head with trembling fingers and a hand prone to tremors / shakes. How can I prove I am not afraid as my voice wavers, lip quivers, and eyes fill full of, what one might call—my bluff? A pair of queens and a pair of sixes both dying to blow me kisses; I raise, you fold.

Check beneath the couch cushions for change and lost keys, with luck you’ll find kernels, dust bunnies, shells of sunflower seeds, and a reason to heed this warning: Learn how to be okay knowing she may never love you. Dance around your bedroom with your eyes squeezed shut, headphones blasting Vampire Weekend and The Shins. He took the second self-titled record out of its sleeve and with him to the grave. Now I listen to the first half of the album and wait in silence for him to finish the rest.

I’ve pleaded and bargained with the Lord, begging him– please grant me his life fully-lived, or at least just a day to hold him close to my chest until our hearts beat in synchronization. What would he tell me? What would I say? I want to hear his laughter fill every belly in every room until our stomachs are aching, and we cry out: Mercy! No more. We cannot stand one more minute of knowing what it’s like to miss you, knowing you’re not going to make it home on Monday morning.

Are dead friends compost for worms or do their bodies melt away in an inferno to a pile of powder, ash, soot? We were supposed to sprinkle his dust in the park where he used to run, only a few miles from my apartment. In another life we would’ve gone on a date; shifted nervously in our seats, looked anywhere but each other’s eyes– I am afraid I will forget their color –and worried that we might jeopardize what was already great. Your adoration for me got lost in translation, stolen glances, and questions unanswered / unasked.

! 23 MONDAYS, CALLS FROM YOUR MOTHER, AND ALL THE THINGS WE’VE LOST

Pass through the rivers and make your way to the golden cloud where Jesus is waiting like he promised because you are good, you are good, you are good

maybe not at math or getting out of bed but it’s okay because I would lay under the covers forever with you and hold your hand like I always meant to but felt afraid because my brain is drowning in a sea of

worry and empty bottles of longing for things that have gone for good or for the better, but not you baby, turn your car around and park in my apartment, I don’t care if they charge us a fine at least you’re mine, in a sense, or a solitude of the swans on the lake and their babies

so ugly they don’t get invited to the party but that’s why you stayed because being alone was something you knew and wanted for nobody else putting puzzles in pairs of two, pictures of cats and a garden with a fountain right in the middle and they said these pieces won’t fit— you said,

watch me, so they did. Your mailbox is full of all the fear of unknown, waiting for answers you can’t give and I forgive you for missing our date in the spring and for never getting back to me about your Halloween.

I was Carrie and my roommate poured blood all over my dress; it looks so real. Maybe next year you could be a zombie or a ghost and please haunt me on Tuesdays when we didn’t have to go to class past one because then I’ll know you got the poems I sent you

enclosed in an ember that rises with flame. Keep your chin up but only so I can stare at the sun and hope to find you tucked in a cloud that only rains when I cry. Can you send me a song or if you’re not busy a letter written on lined paper

in crayon: I miss you, I love you, I wish I could’ve spent life with you forever but at least we were kids and got to share the classroom scissors and help each other with reaching the water fountain. I like to listen to white noise for sleep but preferably your voice telling me things will be sweet

and these are the nothings that I will whisper to an empty bed and records without a player. I want you to reach down and remind me how to keep living without you and the way you loved me without me feeling the usual disbelief.

! 24

Now I am stuck wishing, wishing were real so I could throw every penny in a well and get you back for — ever or at least a moment, and if that doesn’t work then I’ll throw my dimes and quarters to make sense of the call from your mother where she told me, you didn’t survive.

! 25 I WISH YOU HAD BEEN AT THE MITSKI CONCERT

I oftentimes find myself having a hard time saying your name; the faintest of whispers and still, I crumble like a sandcastle getting kicked by a 6-year-old with the knack for destruction. I feel it is cruel now that I can’t remember that age when we were first learning how to read, write, tell time. I wish I could go back and watch us play together, imagining worlds for ourselves where we could fly, or rob banks and never get caught, or slay dragons, or be the world’s greatest spies. I want to listen to your laugh and your voice before it hit puberty, as it is when you wouldn’t answer my call—a voicemail you made in middle school. I listened to it once after you died and I cried on the bathroom floor, my back pressed against the cold wall. I called it once more to get a good listen, your clever retort– if this is one of my friends, I am inside playing video games. If this is one of my parents I am at the library studying. I called late November, a few weeks after, and haven’t been able to call again knowing the phone doesn’t ring and you’ll never answer.

! 26 TO CARL AND VICTOR, WHO WERE THE BROTHERS I NEVER HAD

I.

I miss you. I miss living next to you. I miss smoking on your porch and mine. I miss picking up Earle from his dorm. I miss ordering cookies at midnight. I miss losing every game of Smash, except for the one where I think Carl let me beat him, right at the very end. I miss playing Minecraft– and so much smoking. I miss choosing from the few restaurants where Victor can actually eat. I miss editing your essays. I miss helping with your films. I miss taking pictures of the parking garage and the blue fence and the birds on the water. I miss making too much food and inviting you over to help me eat it. I miss doing homework in Victor’s room and coming over to see it rearranged and pristine– I would then feel motivated to vacuum my carpet and grey shag rugs. I miss your bathroom without the wall. I miss the leak in your ceiling. I miss the bowl of all the shittiest Halloween candies on your table. I miss laughing about stupid things– and crying about what seem like stupid things now. I miss splitting the cost of things three ways, but usually four. I miss seeing you, what might as well’ve been, every day. I miss the seven months I missed. I miss being your biggest fan. I miss the videos you showed me. I miss Grave of the Fireflies. I miss the music we listened to. I miss trying (and failing) to do pull-ups at Victor’s door– and watching Carl try (and fail), exactly the same. I miss when you didn’t knock on my front door– and instead bust in like you had a key. I miss knocking on the window to wake you up in the morning and during the day and at night. I miss the window without blinds. I miss peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bowls of Cap’n Crunch courtesy of Carl. I miss you telling me that you were right, you were always right. I miss always going to Chipotle, even though I prefer Moe’s. I miss the bowls of rice and chicken– just an obscene amount of rice and chicken. I miss your shoes with the hole in the toe. I miss the car wash with Victor– I think he might’ve cleaned his car once a week. I miss the whiteboard. I miss the messages Carl left whenever he went out of town. I miss sitting on your bed and the floor. I miss sitting at your desk and on your bed– with Earle beside me, playing games he was so fucking good at.

Mariana told me that some of her favorite memories were of Earle beating her in Super Smash Bros and all I can do is hope that I do not forget the sound of our laughter filling up that tiny bedroom.

Most of all, I miss the admiration and the way I loved you and our life; I believe at 19 you were the center of my universe– and I know you don’t look at me so fondly, but once you did in our little life that we lived.

II.

Grief has changed us, or maybe the seven months we spent stubborn, angry, not speaking was enough to send us adrift in the cur-sed timeline– the one where Earle is dead and we’re sitting in your four beige walls just down the hall

! 27 from his room, his near-empty room, or at least, I assume, was stripped bare except for some furniture– I was too afraid to ask if I could look inside but I helped his mother unpack some boxes of his dirty, unwashed, inside-out clothes and I know it’s better his room stays as I remember it, with posters and pictures, his records, and all the blankets on the bed. I am sorry you had to pack his belongings into boxes, I can’t imagine having to empty a room in a home you called a nest for cowboys and I know you must have loved living with your best friend, my best friend, the best man any of us have ever known. And I think we are broken because both of you could hardly seem to look at me and I cried at the self-portrait you made in charcoal, where you looked exactly like I remembered you.

III.

I imagine us all suspended, floating, in a Temple of Sorrow where we are so close the tips of our fingers are almost touching, but I can never seem to clasp your hands. We are this now, perpetually out of reach. It is majestic, how we are all enveloped in the same royal blue velvet, cosmically adrift in the vast expanse of our grief. Yet we remain rifted; you only calling my phone when you need me, my help, and I am reminded of the nature of my relationships– questioning the value I have, if any at all, is what I seem to do when suspended, floating above the jagged mountain tops in the mist of an overcast morning.

! 28 THE PEARL

The gem that comes from the sea is said to attract good luck and wealth; Legend has it pearls will keep your children safe while they sleep soundly in the bedroom across the house and you have to remember you can’t stop them from having bad dreams but you can give them a bed to climb into when they wake in a sweat having dreamt their premature death. Soothe your son, whose hair curls right above his eyes, tell him he will make it back home that night where you are waiting to hold him and hold him and hold him.

Pearls are protectors— they seek to bring balance and peace. If I’d been his bride I would’ve had pearls adorning my neck for him as a wink and a nudge; holding our pinkies behind the curtain because the best moments with him were the ones I caught his eye across the room, and we spoke without ever parting our lips.

! 29 LIPSTICK STAINS IN YOUR EMPTY BED

My lipstick is a deep rouge and I wonder if you would’ve liked the taste of my bottom lip or the curve of my neck to shoulder down to the tips of my fingers that would trace their way across your spine, lightly, and then digging; searching for their place in your skin. I would like to touch you when I could feel the warmth of blood and your lungs expanding in your ribs.

! 30 BABY BIRDS FREE-FALLING FROM THEIR NEST

He gently lifts me from my slumber at the same early hour on the anniversary of his passing every month— I wake in a sweat but realize that my room is the coldest in the house. I shiver, though I do not feel afraid: I have imagined him as a ghost for months to cope with the thought that he is not listening from somewhere past the moon. My cycle waxes and wanes with the blinding space rock, unwavering in the night sky. Monthly, I choose not to give much thought to all the eggs I’ve lost, like a songbird dropping her featherless children from the nest, ten stories above the forest floor. The article I read, said what’s for the best

is that only 30% of songbirds survive their first year of life. They called it nature’s population control. It is an environment without the capacity to sustain 70% of its children. And so I sit, emotionless, in a porcelain tub, filling with my own blood. There are still stains from last Halloween when my roommate poured the deep red from my temple and down the white dress I thrifted from the shop on Monroe. I felt it slip slowly down my spine and past my breasts to fill the pool in my belly button. Alone in my bedroom, later that October eve— I undressed and stared at my skin, scabbing over in dried blood and spiked punch. That’s when I thought: this is as good as it gets.

! 31 PRESSED FLOWERS, AFTERNOON SHOWERS, AND ALL THE REASONS I CAN’T GET OUT OF BED IN THE MORNING

Once Earle and I met at the library– it had something to do with my inability to implement routine into my life. I showed him the schedule I had made to optimize my morning; he commented in astonishment that I had planned it out even down to 5-minute increments of time.

Wake Up. Get Out Of Bed. Make Yourself Healthy Breakfast, You Know, Oatmeal Or Something. Eat. Wash Your Dishes. Go To Gym. Get Rid Of That Belly Fat You Can’t Stop Obsessing Over. Go Back To Apartment. Shower. Cry While You’re Showering To Save Extra Time. Wash Your Face. No, Seriously You Need To Get Into The Habit Of Washing Your Face, You Don’t Want Premature Wrinkles From All The Stress That Anxiety Causes, Do You? Brush Your Teeth. Lay Back In Bed For Five Minutes And Stare At The Glow-In-The-Dark Stars You Have Taped To Your Ceiling. Think. Worry. Stop. Pack Yourself A Healthy Lunch, I Don’t Know, Maybe A Salad And Some Oranges. Take Your Hair Out Of Towel And Try And Tame The Bangs You Just Cut. Put On Concealer Under Your Eyes To Cover The Bags That Make You Look Tired. Shape Your Eyebrows. Apply Mascara, Eyeliner On A Good Day. Double-Check You Have Everything You Need Before You Leave The House. Go To School. Try To Survive The Day. Repeat. Every Day. Over And Over. Until You’re The Perfect Version Of A Woman That Would Make Her Mother Proud.

I hope he knows not a single day did I manage to follow my own Schedule -- maybe it was too rigid, or maybe I’m not good with structure; the support beams holding my apartment three stories off the pavement

are made of concrete but someone thought it would be a good idea to leave their handprint in wet cement and now it has hardened in a shape that is so close to a perfect cylinder, but the place where he left the impression of his fingertips has cracked, and each night I can hear my carpet rumble with the might of human touch and how if we are not careful, the floor will collapse right out from under us. I think often of the presentation I did on Pompeii in 5th grade and how I was already thinking about a life suddenly taken and without means to escape the memorialization of existence - - frozen in time, hands reaching out for no one to grab.

Now I cannot get the image of your final moments out of my mind, eyes wide in horror, steering toward oncoming headlights, bright white and giving you the perfect backdrop to watch your entire life flash before your eyes and then looking briefly at the polaroid picture on your dashboard that I took of you when we smoked on my porch last March.

! 32 SUSPENDED IN THE SKY WITH YOU, LAST SPRING

The grief often forgets when it is supposed to stay buried under a layer of my skin— it spreads over my face until I am covered in red splotches, hives, and sympathy for the people who have to endure the tree pollen falling every spring; a cyclical period of having trouble catching your breath or getting the golden dust off the hood of your station wagon. Sometimes I would like to make a line of the pine pollen and snort it to get a whiff of their suffering— an itch of the nose, watery eyes (you swear you’re not crying), and the feeling of your lungs clawing their way out your throat, to breathe-in some of that sweet, sweet air. Liberation! I would like to be free of myself, and my mind that lingers on the memories of him and the night we sat in my hammock– bodies tangled, awkward and I thought I might crush him, but we ordered cheese pizza, and had it delivered to the tree where we were hanging. I took a photograph of our socks in the grass and I don’t think you saw me in April stealing that moment I wanted to hold on to forever. I should’ve told you I loved you when our legs were intertwined and we didn’t finish our movie.

! 33 I WILL SPEND THE REST OF MY LIFE LONGING FOR EVERYTHING THAT COULD HAVE BEEN

If you could’ve sworn on your grave that you loved me, would you have done it if you knew we’d be digging it before the end of the decade? I catch myself searching for you in the creases of my bedsheets, the glare of the sun, and in a hamper full of my clean laundry that I can’t be bothered to fold / put on hangers / shove in a drawer. Kiss me on the lips and give me your last breath so I can bury it in my lung to find on every Monday

when I am thinking of you, always of you and the suitcase full of your wrinkled t-shirts. I laid in your bed and looked at the records your favorite bands signed, because what else can anyone do when someone’s young son is dead? I opened up the bedside furniture full of everything you left behind when we graduated high school. Your wallet had a used gift card to the bookstore and a punch card for a free sandwich. You only needed four more punches to get your sub.

My roommate lived near a golf course in Virginia, but you can’t putt in the snow. So in December he cut across the green to school looking for balls that got lost in the sea of ice crystals and defrosted car windows, because everything you lose is in plain sight. Whenever I can’t find my glasses, they always seem to be right on top of my head.

! 34 POEM WITH A SHORT TITLE

You sure like those long titles, don’t you? Ted asks after reading my newest poem– the one I wrote on the porch of the café I couldn’t go inside, with the hot dog and the sweet tea I bought from the vendor beside the English building, because their window says: NO OUTSIDE FOOD OR DRINK. I forgot before I bought the contraband lunch, but it’s alright because the sky is clear and

the breeze is gentle enough that I don’t have to layer my sweater under my hoodie under my jean jacket with the flowers embroidered in purple and burnt orange that is hanging in my closet next to the sweater I gave Earle last spring when we sat and stared at the water, black in the night, with the only reflection being the bottom of his beat-up Chucks and the white sneakers I found at Goodwill for eight dollars.

Yes, I laugh and peer across the table through my glasses and his wondering if we’ll grow up to be poets or if we will leave the language behind to pursue a life more lucrative than that of a writer who thinks and thinks and does little else. I watch him scribble with his red ink pen in a journal that I hope doesn’t end up at the bottom of a moving box

collecting dust in an attic of a house with a white picket fence and the garden that his wife tends to, all while he stuffs his briefcase full of abandoned dreams and the dulled glint in his eyes after passing young adulthood. I am afraid that we will grow old and weary, picking up the pieces of destruction and stillness and the way the world looks when pain can no longer be made romantic and the flowers stop blooming on cherry blossom trees and passion is lost as we endure the cruelty of windowless bedrooms and sermons for our friends– dead and gone.

! 35 THE FIRST TIME VISITING THE HOUSE YOU GREW UP IN

His mother wept into my arms after reading the poem I wrote for him the day after he died. She said, oh darling, he absolutely adored you.

! 36 STORMY, THE EMOTIONAL SUPPORT RABBIT

Even rabbits can twist their ankles but they don’t get crutches or an ace bandage and I think it’s commendable that they hop through the pain, because what other choice do they have? Bea, his sister, got an emotional support bunny, but I worry that the way her nose scrunches is cute but won’t be enough to end the never-ending pain of losing an older brother. She tells me they were supposed to go to Europe together and this summer when she goes and sees some of the most beautiful creations made by man, I am sure she will think about how’d she’d much rather be looking at his face, which is arguably, the same thing. I always wanted an older brother when I was growing up and I would ask for him as a gift from my mother, even though I was already born first and had to be protector, oldest sibling, fuck up first so no one else has to, and now so does Bea. What do I do without him to guide me? She is alone (with just a rabbit) in Salt Lake City, two thousand miles from the road that I like to imagine he is driving, forever, down the stretch of street leading toward a brilliant sunset of magenta, emerald, and cream.

! 37 IF I CLOSE MY EYES, I CAN FEEL YOUR HAND ON MY CHEEK

Hold still darling, I will conjure you back into my life.

The permanence of death will not stop me from whispering all my secrets, fears, shortcomings for only you to hear. I picture the words

getting lifted gently in the undercurrent of wind and floating to wherever you might be listening. One year around the corner, then the realization

I am no witch, nor mad scientist, and I have no way to travel through time outside of my mind. Slowly, my memories fail me. I remember nothing but what it has felt like to lose you. I do not even remember

if I hugged you goodbye on the last night I saw you. What were you wearing on that crisp evening last October? My roommates were gossiping about us in the living room, after we left to go read the poems I had written, alone in my room.

Ok, there is definitely something going on between them, that’s what my roommate said, to which the others agreed, and I wonder if deep down you knew I loved you too. I regret all the time we spent silently in our own admiration, never daring to act on the sped-up rate of our hearts. I spent 5 years loving abuse and the confirmation he gave me that I’d never be enough.

I was nothing, and he was simply acting accordingly. And that made sense to me. You were kind and you were thoughtful; you listened when I talked to you and respected what I had to say. I am thankful to have been loved by you, I only wish we had more time to tell one another.

! 38 WAITING FOR THE CALL FROM BEYOND

I knelt to kiss him, my head on his bony shoulder. It’s hard to die beautifully; I imagined his life lived and lost then my hand on his cheek. I woke up later alone.

! 39

Mondays, Calls from your Mother, and All the Things We’ve Lost is a product of a period of intense loss. I had already been working with my thesis director, David Kirby, in the Fall of

2019; I was taking his workshop and running collection focuses by him when one of my friends,

Earle Kelly, passed tragically in a car accident a week before his 21st birthday. From there, the focus became clear—my personal life had become flooded by grief. This thirty-one-poem collection is an accumulation of grieving over the loss of my close friend in November of 2019, grieving over the loss of a childhood and the way I viewed my parents as figures of stability and unconditional love, and grieving over relationship losses, amongst the confusing nature of one’s own budding sexuality. The thesis is titled after one of the first poems I wrote for this collection,

Mondays, Calls from your Mother, and All the Things We’ve Lost, which I wrote on November

7th, four days after my friend’s passing. This raw pain being channeled into writing laid the groundwork for the rest of the thesis, and many of the poems were written in periods of high emotional intensity.

The collection begins with the poem, “Angels Landing, Devil’s Tower,” which was written in December of 2019, the night after I was sexually assaulted in my hometown by someone I considered to be a friend. The poem examines the idea of strength or a lack of it.

There are heavy comparisons to mountains, rocks, and other unmovable sturdy pieces of nature, which help to demonstrate the expectations one feels to hold it all together, even in face of severe tragedy and pain. In this piece I express my frustration at the strength I am expected to wield and although I repeat to the reader, “I am not a monolith. I am not a stone that stands firmly in place”

(4), it seems to have the opposite effect. After all, near the end of the poem I explain, “I am a woman who has been carved from the canyons and chasms so deep, they do not echo” (4). There is a silence to the poem, and it attempts to express all the pain that I—and other women who

! 40 have experienced sexual violence are expected to carry within themselves. While much of my thesis is rooted in personal experience, I seek to put words to the complex emotions experienced across the human spectrum; I will be vulnerable where others cannot, I will find ways to express the inexpressible.

The thesis moves forward in a semi-chronological fashion, dancing gently through the first months of the loss, jumping back and forth between grief over death and grief over a loss of innocence, which is explored through my parents and their inability to accept my sexuality and through the downfall of a 5 year emotionally abusive friendship. I often draw parallels through these two relationships as both of them were manipulative and skewed my perception of self. In

“Outside The Library Waiting To Meet With My Friend, Marisa, To Talk About What We

Missed Over Holiday Break,” I explore the night I discovered my parents had outed me to the rest of my extended family. In it, I speak in an angry, almost cynical way, mimicking the words of my homophobic family. Tanner makes an appearance in this poem but not as I knew him or understood him, but rather as the scapegoat for my queerness. Because of our failed friendship and my unreturned loved, I must be choosing to be with women instead, or at least, that’s what my parents tell themselves at night. This often finds itself to be the dilemma—my parents do not recognize the broader issues and why our relationship is broken—they do not see me. Logically, the thesis moves to “I Saw Heaven When I Was Sixteen, Faint, And Days From Dropping To

The Floor, Half-Dead,” which elaborates on the beginning of the decline of my innocence. The poem jumps between two events, one at the age of 12, and the other at the age of 16, like stated in the title. Both events, seemingly unrelated, represent times when my mother let me down; in the first event, it is due to her infidelity, and in the second, it is a more literal representation of her not being there when I needed her.

! 41 Connecting themes and ideas, the thesis then moves onward and into the real, Tanner, not the one that my parents see as the root of my queerness, but rather the one that behaves in a manner just like my parents. In “If I Am Like My Mother, Then You Are Like Your Father,” I begin to answer the hypothetical question posed in “Outside The Library Waiting To Meet With

My Friend, Marisa, To Talk About What We Missed Over Holiday Break,” where I ask in a mocking manner: “isn’t anyone paying attention when I kiss a girl because Tanner wouldn’t love me back? It’s like my mother says: she got screwed over by men and decided to be gay now” (8).

But what I seek to call attention to in this poem is the quietness, the silence of a loss, and the yearning for a sound. There is no dialogue in this poem, rather Tanner is seen only through the recollection of what he once told me, that I am like my mother. This is an obviously devastating blow, as the thesis has just described my mother’s cruelty and closed-mindedness, as well as her repeated betrayal throughout my childhood. This of course leads to some more silent scenes that translate the past into the future in a way that does not leave me vulnerable; turning his disgust towards me back in his direction; metaphorized by a game of Poker and a pair of reflective sunglasses.

The thesis then moves back through poems about my mother and connects them to poems about Tanner; in this case, “Cycles,” and “Translucent Skies on a Rainy Afternoon in March.”

Both inspired by thunderstorms, they explore the nature of these toxic relationships. They both seem to work in a circle, revealing the cyclical nature of abuse and the isolating/trapped feeling one has in these relationships. But as the thesis moves forward, the speaker grows and becomes more aware of the manipulative nature of these relationships and begins to fully come into themselves and their identity. This kind of self-awakening is continued through nature metaphors and is neatly tied up in “Stomping in Anthills and All the Reasons He Shouldn’t be with Me,” in

! 42 which I make comparisons between my relationship with Tanner and my mother, and of course, myself. Ultimately, there is a sense that we are trying to run away from something; my mother from her domestic life, and myself from real love and who I fall for. I realize that much of my love for Tanner came from the thrill of his status; “I am not a good woman; I have only loved the grandeur of a romance with a man who studies the art of being who he is not. I did not know him, but I was enthralled by the thought that I knew him better than all the other people who thought they knew him too” (15). This helps point to the dynamic of our relationship and the way that I put him on a pedestal, causing me to always be smaller and less important than him. This feeling was a self-fulfilling prophecy learned at home where my mother made me feel small and question my emotions/validity.

A questioning of one’s own emotions and the validity of one’s feelings is a recurring theme throughout the thesis. What becomes apparent is the way one’s identity being at direct odds with a parent’s love will leave deep wounds. There is a yearning and a desire for fulfillment that will never come. Much of this thesis acts as a reflection, staring into a childhood and watching it replay almost like a dream. There is a sense that I am releasing the truths that I was certain of as a child or a teenager and coming to terms with the colder reality. This dreamy recollection can be especially seen in “Staring Out The Window of The City Bus on a Rainy

Evening,” which acts as a response to the other poems discussing Tanner and I’s relationship, in this poem I am riding the last bus of the night and I take note of the bus driver’s quiet anticipation. Just as the driver is making his last round trip of the night, I am coming to terms with the end of something. I leave the reader with an image of him admiring me when I wasn’t looking, which can be seen then as potentially misleading; I have no way of knowing if he was actually watching me in admiration, but rather just hoping that he was. This is symbolic of the

! 43 relationship and the lack of affection or reassurance, but paired next to the bus driver, the reader can conclude that there was a familiarity to the relationship, a comfort in the routine. But moving past this poem, the thesis begins to show a break from the routine and begins nosediving into the loss that changed me and served as a ruder awakening to the unpredictability of life and the way

I did not have time to waste being anyone other than myself.

There have been miniature crumbs throughout the first half of the thesis about Earle’s passing, but in “Chapped Lips, Pressed Thighs, and Severe Thunderstorm Warnings in Early

July,” the whispering becomes more of a shout as I realize that relationship we could’ve had was lost before it ever even left our lips. The pain over what never had the chance to be explored and fleshed out is the focus of the second half of the thesis, and I grapple with a lost love while also navigating through the abusive, conditional love I’ve been taught. “In another life we would’ve gone on a date; shifted nervously in our seats, looked anywhere but each other’s eyes– I am afraid I will forget their color –and worried that we might jeopardize what was already great.

Your adoration for me got lost in translation, stolen glances, and questions unanswered / unasked” (23). All that was left unsaid in his life, I lay bare after his death. This is especially expressed in “Mondays, Calls From Your Mother, and All The Things We’ve Lost,” the titular poem which was written in the height of my grief. This poem acts as a love letter to the wind, written as an expression of the love I had been too afraid to express. The poem weaves feelings of regret, fondness, fear, and ache together in an attempt to encapsulate the tidal wave of emotions that were running through my head immediately following Earle’s death.

Each poem after then seeks to zero in on a specific moment or feeling to help paint a fuller picture of who Earle was, our relationship, and how his death rippled outwards and affected other aspects of my life and the lives of others who loved him. In poems, “The Pearl,”

! 44 and “Lipstick Stains in Your Empty Bed,” I create a fantasy reality, one where I imagine what it would’ve been like to have been with him romantically and physically; I imagine a wedding where we tell each other things unknown to anyone else “without ever parting our lips” (29), which then leads into “I wonder if you would’ve liked the taste of my bottom lip or the curve of my neck” (30). Here the reader gets to climb into the dream with the speaker, they are made privy to the musings that I’ve previously mentioned or alluded to; the daydreams where I pretend he is not really gone.

The fantasy is abruptly shattered in “Pressed Flowers, Afternoon Showers, And All The

Reasons I Can’t Get Out Of Bed In The Morning.” The poem gives insight into my inner monologue which is hypercritical and obsessed with perfection; my organization is an outward façade and I admit that to Earle and the reader. I explain my routine which helps point to my desire for structure, but then compare it to a presentation I did on Pompeii in the 5th grade, which shows very clearly the chaos and unpredictability of life. This is what leads me to the very heart- wrenching reality of what I had spent much of the thesis not wanting to fully admit—Earle is dead and gone. “Now I cannot get the image of your final moments out of my mind, eyes wide in horror, steering toward oncoming headlights, bright white and giving you the perfect backdrop to watch your entire life flash before your eyes” (32). There is a certain horror and violence that many dances around, but these grueling and intense thoughts are just as much a part of the grief as is the denial and the fantasy. From here forward, my poems begin again to explore the regret of all the things left unsaid, or at least, the things I thought I had more time to say.

This I believe brings the thesis full circle to what I hope the reader takes away from the reading; you don’t have any time to waste hiding from who you are and what you want. In my grieving, I realized I had lost a friendship and the possibility for a love that didn’t have

! 45 conditions, a love I had never thought I deserved. But through this loss there is transformation and out of my grief is birthed a newfound need to say all the things I would’ve never been brave enough to say. This thesis is a declaration of self, a declaration of love, and a declaration of what

I have lost, but wish to hold on to forever. Through the pain, there is transformation, one that

Earle acts as a catalyst for. The thesis ends with “Waiting for the Call from Beyond,” a short three sentence poem in which I wake up from the dream, this translating over to the dreamlike flow of the thesis and ending it with an awakening back into reality. In the dream, I am with

Earle and I kiss him goodbye, when I wake up, I am alone. Although there is a twinge of sadness to this ending, I do not believe my being alone means that I am lonely. Rather, I have shed the toxicity from my life and embraced my identity, and most importantly I have spoken freely of my experiences with abuse and my feelings of love, and I have broken free from the fear of what it would mean to admit either of these things. As the great phoenix, who rises from the ashes, I have channeled my pain through my writing and will only come out stronger for it. I strongly believe this empowerment is translated to the reader through the level of vulnerability expressed and the strength carried through a life of faulty templates and warped mirrors.

My writing is heavily influenced and inspired by the likes of Jack Gilbert and Sharon

Olds, each of whom write about personal topics without feeling the need to bite ones’ tongue.

The first ever poem I read by Sharon Olds, “His Stillness” recounts the moment her father received a diagnosis from the doctor essentially giving him a few months to live; what I drew most from this was the close focus on a lack of movement. This knack for zeroing in on very specific aspects of grief was something I deeply admired about Olds’ work. I was also largely inspired by Olds’ book, Odes, which focused a lot on bodily function and other aspects of womanhood that most would be ashamed to talk about so openly. Her lack of shame towards all

! 46 the gross and confusing aspects of life helped me to be freer in discussing topics that I felt ashamed of, especially regarding my mother and the violence/blood. One of the first areas of my writing you’re likely to notice the inspiration of Jack Gilbert, is in the title of my pieces. Before reading Gilbert’s work, I hated trying to come up with a title and often left them short or created them directly from a line of the poem. After reading Gilbert, I realized how important the title is; as an introduction to the piece, I like to create a long title that almost serves as its own line.

Rather than just describe the piece, I feel that the title adds something new to the piece and should be attention-grabbing. Gilbert isn’t just gaudy in his titles, I also felt the influence of his writing appear within my own. When you think Gilbert is writing about one thing, it takes a turn and then he is writing about another, but before you can protest, he has wound the two together in a neat bow. I often found myself jumping between two or three topics and drawing parallels within poems and across poems throughout the entirety of my thesis, drawing connections to things and ideas that I might have never seen the similarities in otherwise. In Jack Gilbert’s

Collected Poems, I was able to read the anthology of his life’s work and what particularly struck me were the poems written in his grief following the passing of his wife, Michiko. When reading these poems in my fall workshop with David Kirby, I was deeply moved by Gilbert’s ability to express his love tangibly and explore the oddities of loss, including the belief that his dead wife had reincarnated in his neighbor’s dalmatian. I believe he expressed delusion in a way that stayed rooted in reality and I hoped to draw from that in my own poetry as I believe the duality helps fully encompass what it means to grieve. This thesis rejects black-and-white thinking and moves thoughtfully through childhood to young adulthood freely and towards self-acceptance and loving myself the way that Earle did, the way that Earle would’ve wanted me to.

! 47 Works Cited

Gilbert, Jack. Collected Poems. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

Olds, Sharon. “His Stillness.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47058/his-stillness.

Olds, Sharon. Odes. Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

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