Poetry / Melanie Figg

:: Getting Dark ::

                I should have left sooner—I didn’t catch

the quick exit, the growing coldness,
his lack of peripheral vision, casually assuming
              the road would do as he willed, the unhinged jaw—

* 	* 	*

Someone built a labyrinth by the creek. I trace
its path bordered by gray stones and fig buttercup.
At each turn I feel myself returning
from years of silence, trying to, trying—

                                                      The phantom of me filling in uneven with regret—

Blood coming back to the ghost hands.

              The heart empty after so much refusal, following
              where the stones steer. The ease of no choice, just a route to follow—

* 	* 	*

During a laying on of hands
                          she found my ex in my solar plexus
                                                                   he likes to hang out there
in your power center, where you set your goals. Panic flared
              to scatter reason: in me how long did I let him in no wonder oh god oh god—

At these moments, it’s best to politely ask them to leave.

          My hands fly to my throat,
                                     stunned birds bouncing from the window, arms numbing—

          I told him it was in his best interest to leave now. 	He took
quickly to that, no surprise, and she moved her hands to my neck. Circling back

                           before my time was up
                                                                she found him still lingering at the fueling station.

Gravel scattered as he pulled back onto the road. 

From the writer

:: Account ::

In most of my poems, I explore mem­o­ry, and absence, and grief—how that can be rep­re­sent­ed on the page with white space, a stut­ter­ing line, a reach­ing beyond nar­ra­tive. A lot of my poems sit in between nar­ra­tive and lyric as I try to slow down the move­ment between a thought and a feeling—the tran­si­tion as one changes one’s mind, or lets go of bad math or unhelp­ful ver­sions. My new man­u­script includes poems from a wide range of sub­ject matter.

One: I’ve been untan­gling from a ter­ri­ble mar­riage and have been explor­ing the expe­ri­ence of slow manip­u­la­tion and gaslight­ing, of los­ing one­self to an idea that has dis­con­nect­ed from real­i­ty and to a per­son you no longer rec­og­nize. That skewed per­spec­tive, that pro­found sense of destabilization—how to exam­ine that expe­ri­ence in lan­guage, and in white space on the page? The glimpses of recog­ni­tion, of return, of recovery—how can those moments be doc­u­ment­ed in a way that can offer a read­er acknowl­edge­ment or under­stand­ing? I want to slow down emo­tion­al tran­si­tions so they can be explored and mapped, accepted.

Two: I’ve also been writ­ing poems about a promi­nent cold case from my rur­al girl­hood: the Con­necti­cut Riv­er Val­ley Ser­i­al Killer. From 1978–1988, author­i­ties believe one man drove up and down I‑91 along the riv­er that divides Ver­mont and New Hamp­shire. As a young teenag­er, women around me were abduct­ed and mur­dered and found lat­er near­by. Of the nine women he was believed to kill, I knew two of them: a girl from my high school who used to bul­ly me, and one of my mother’s best friends for whom I babysat her son. Sure­ly such inten­tion­al and ran­dom vio­lence had left its mark on me? How much were my ideas of gen­der, agency, safe­ty, and nature formed from this?

“Get­ting Dark” is one of the first “bridge” poems that I’ve writ­ten for the man­u­script. I was strug­gling to fig­ure out how knit togeth­er these two seem­ing­ly dis­parate, but actu­al­ly deeply relat­ed, top­ics into one book—until I real­ized I could do the weav­ing inside some of the poems. In “Get­ting Dark” I found that some “ser­i­al killer” imagery added an inter­est­ing dimen­sion to the bad-hus­band nar­ra­tive. I’m curi­ous to see how far this imagery-trade strat­e­gy can work as I con­tin­ue to build the man­u­script. I don’t think the read­er needs to know about the ser­i­al killer stuff to get this poem, but know­ing it adds a deep­er read­ing, I hope, and steers the read­er to make con­nec­tions about small and large scale sys­tems of misog­y­ny, how oppres­sive sys­tems enter our per­son­al lives.

Melanie Figg’s writ­ing awards include Fel­low­ships from the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts, The McK­night Foun­da­tion, and the Mary­land State Arts Coun­cil. In her award-win­ning debut col­lec­tion, Trace, from New Rivers Press, “Figg kin­dles bro­ken, dying embers into a roar­ing memo­r­i­al for the voiceless.”(Kirkus starred review). Her poems have been pub­lished in dozens of jour­nals, includ­ing LIT, Col­orado Review, and The Iron Horse Lit­er­ary Review. Melanie teach­es writ­ing, offers women’s writ­ing retreats, and works remote­ly with all kinds of writers.