Poetry / Chelsea Rathburn
:: Why I Can’t Watch Poltergeist ::
Because the horror played in endless loops on HBO the summer I was eight and my cousins made me watch when no adults were home, then told me that I couldn’t tell. Because the trap door to our attic hid inside my closet, just like the one in the movie, so my closet no longer softly glowed but seemed to seethe with light from one bare bulb, and my cousins all swore it was a portal to the Other Side, and though I called them liars I worried it was true. Because when I learned, years later, about the ancient burial mounds of the Tequesta that Henry Flagler leveled to build Miami’s first grand hotel, I thought of the scene with the muddy swimming pool and all the angry skeletons roiling in it, and their fury seemed reasonable, and the land cursed. Because even though I’d like to read it now as an obvious metaphor for mindless consumption and American greed, I’m afraid that I’ll be eight again, pressed into the couch cushions, convinced that I could call my worst fears into life, and certain that if they came no one would breach the lip of the attic door to rescue me.
:: The One About the Haunted House ::
At first, the jokes we made about the ghost were jokes, our way of laughing off the lights that turned on by themselves in empty rooms and the pictures that kept falling from the walls. Neither of us believed in ghosts, but we named ours Bobby, after the former occupant. Oh, that’s just Bobby, we’d tell our dinner guests when the range hood fan began its frantic spin. We’d explain how it all could be explained – faulty wiring, shoddy nails – and besides, he didn’t die here but in a nursing home. We didn’t believe in ghosts but by all accounts ours was a kind man when alive (we learned he’d been married once to a local politician not known for being kind), and the haunting, if it was a haunting, seemed less malevolent than bewildered. Neither of us believed in ghosts, then things got louder and stranger, and the problem of our not believing seemed smaller than the problem of the ghost we didn’t believe in, and though I felt ridiculous, I bought crystals and Googled exorcists and tried to keep the fear out of my voice in front of our daughter. It was a joke that sent him packing: my husband shook a fist at the ceiling and threatened to call the ex-wife if he acted up again, and just like that, the noises stopped. Our cups and plates no longer flew off of the shelves, and his leaving became a kind of punchline, though I felt a little guilty no one missed him, once I was certain he was really gone.
From the writer
:: Account ::
For the past few years, I’ve been writing poems about home and foundations (physical and metaphorical, stable and otherwise). While I’m interested in the ways people choose to build safe spaces in the world, more often I find myself considering the precarity of home, exploring things like infestations, hauntings, natural disasters, and the long reach of poverty or abuse across generations. In a sense, these are ideas that have preoccupied me since I was a child in Miami, Florida, living first in a series of apartments and later in a house my family really couldn’t afford. As a kid, I was convinced that we would lose our house, so perhaps it’s no wonder that the movie Poltergeist, which I saw when I was far too young, terrified me. When I was writing “Why I Can’t Watch Poltergeist,” I had to rely on synopses and screenshots because I could not bring myself to see the movie again. (I’ve always had extremely vivid dreams, and even watching the trailer for a horror film can give me nightmares for a week.) Given how terrified I was as a kid of being dragged to the Other Side through the attic trap door in my closet, I’m oddly not that frightened to find myself as an adult living in a house where uncanny things happen. I’m still hesitant to say that I believe in ghosts, but Bobby – who’d taken his leave when I wrote “The One About the Haunted House” – still shows up from time to time.
Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife (LSU Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Eric Hoffer Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Poetry, the Southern Review, and other journals. Born and raised in Florida, she has called Georgia home since 2001 and currently teaches at Mercer University in Macon. Since 2019, she has served as the Poet Laureate of Georgia.