November | 2021 | SRPR Blog

Karen Hilberg, whose poems “Grim” and “Now, soft” appear in SRPR 46.1, speaks to the nature of place without memory, and the disjointed nature of poetry as apt for parsing the body in its various places.

I am good at starting over somewhere new; I’ve had to do it more times than I’d like. My last move was from Mexico to Chicago. I didn’t know a single person in the city and I was still grieving the loss of my home in Mexico, but I set about accepting as familiar all the strangeness of the new city: the light pollution, the six-cornered intersections, my too-hot radiator that I couldn’t turn down. My second winter, just as it had begun to feel like home, I lost my short-term memory from a head injury. Suddenly, everything was unfamiliar again.

I would look up from my book to a strange room and not remember how I came to be there. Looking out the window told me nothing of what city I was in. My long-term memories were undamaged, stored in a different part of my brain, and they came to fill in the present moment. In the grocery store I froze at the cash register, unable to remember if I was in Mexico or the US. In the shower my shaky legs and painful head placed me back in Kansas after a car accident at 17, but when I stepped out of the shower, my face in the mirror looked wrong. I was staying in a friend’s spare bedroom, while they cared for me during my recovery. At night, the airplanes flying in low towards O’Hare woke me to confusion—I had no long-term memory of living somewhere you could hear planes. I panicked at the thought of sleeping in a strange place, but I was scared to put my feet to the floor. In the darkness, I felt like my bed was floating in a void. If I could be any place I’ve ever been, it felt like being nowhere at all.

Without memory, even my body—a home I had taken for granted—became a foreign place. My sense of being in my own body felt incidental and as temporary as my presence in a room. The appearance of my own hands would surprise me. I could move my body at my command, but my limbs felt impossibly distant, a wilderness away.

My ability to write had also been affected by the head injury and my doctors told me that if I didn’t work at it, I could lose that ability permanently. The disjointed lines I wrote made better poems than prose. They told a narrative of everything that had ever happened to me, happening to me now all at once, and all the places I have ever been being here right now.

My confusion told a truth: place is not meaningful as the generic location of the events of our lives, but as the intimate memory of the person we were when we were there. There’s no way to access one without the other. When I write about the grass hills of Kansas, the dust in Mexico, or how Lake Michigan changes color every day, I am talking about the girl I was while hiking those hills, how the layer of dust that covered everything in Mexico felt like a tactile reminder of how far I was from home, and how I resented trading my ocean view in Mexico for Lake Michigan’s poor imitation.

I have been in Chicago for over a decade now, the longest I have ever lived anywhere. But I am starting over here a second time. I know I can lose a place without ever leaving it. I can be lost in my own bed. I know I can be a stranger in my own body. And the roots I put down are never stronger than the fragile touch of neuron synapse.

Karen Hilberg studied writing and translation at Knox College. She left a teaching career with Chicago Public Schools after a traumatic brain injury. Her ability to both speak and write were profoundly affected, and her writing and translation came from her years struggling to regain language. Her translations have been published in the Massachusetts Review and her poetry in the Spoon River Poetry Review.

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Cindy King, whose poem “Capacitor (Be Mine)” appears in SRPR Issue 46.1, speaks to the social image of the widow and how poetry might serve as a site of its interrogation.

Widows, widowers, those who’ve lost their partners—they exist in the borderlands, the margins: seen and unseen, heard but not, both dead and very much alive. “Capacitor (Be Mine)” was born of this place—on the edge, at the fringe, between sanity and madness, coherence and chaos. In a larger sense, the poem attempts to grapple with and potentially subvert stereotypes and received ideas about widowhood, and by extension sexuality and romantic love. By calling attention to these misconceptions through the appropriation of their accompanying clichés and tropes, I wish to continue exploring the consequences of being removed—sometimes suddenly, violently—from the context of what is for most of us a major part of our identity: our life partners, in both the literal and figurative sense, our home.

In probing the socially-constructed concept of “widow” as it is shaped and reinforced in the popular imagination through mainstream media, of particular interest to me is the trope of husbandless women: sexually starved, and as a consequence, presumably licentious, undoubtedly perverse. Despite some movement towards the acceptance of expressions of women’s sexual appetites, there remains a degree of taboo, particularly as it applies to those who have lost their partners. Short of throwing themselves on the proverbial funeral pyre, what constitutes acceptable behavior for widowed women involves eternal faithfulness, loyalty, and consequently, lifelong celibacy. To carry the black parasol, to forever wear the shawl, the expectation is to quietly, solitarily settle into tragedy, to take on “widow” as one’s new mantle. Real or imagined, to whatever extent, there exists a stigma surrounding widows’ outward expression of happiness or pleasure—particularly as it comes from remarriage, dating, or sexual encounter.

The poem’s rapid shifts and its frequent lack of smooth transition reflect a particular viewpoint, the way those who have lost must often process memory and experience—through the selective and severed thinking required to suppress triggering landmines. Survival necessitates living in the moment, that liminal space without past or future. It is in this space that the poem alludes to the performance of romantic relationships on social media platforms, performances that include not only high points, but also the low. With the shift to “workers at fulfillment centers,” I hope to reveal how our preoccupation with romance and the pursuit of romantic relationships serves to obfuscate things such as the exploitation of human capital. The beginning of the poem’s final stanza serves as a comment on how often the value of simply being in a relationship supersedes the quality of the relationship itself. Here the poem also confronts the social expectation and pressure to be “coupled” in our culture, exposing how ironically it leads to alienation from others—and ultimately ourselves.

I engage with received language at various points in the poem, and particularly with those words we often encounter at the end of fairytales—especially those that end in marriage: “…and they lived happily ever after.” These words, as they are referenced in the penultimate stanza and echoed as the poem’s last lines, represent a breakdown of this trope, an interrogation and dismantling of the construct. That from a young age we are steeped and situated in this language serves to inform and solidify our expectations of romantic love and relationships as adults. Again, the last lines appropriate the “love mythology” of our childhood in the image of Cupid’s arrow, but here it appears in our own hands. While we have agency to aim and throw it (however desperately, without a bow) at our potential lover, all attempts are futile. That in fact, the prospect of finding—or retaining—the proverbial “soulmate” for an imagined ever after constitutes nothing more than an illusion.

Cindy King’s most recent publications include poems in The Sun, Callaloo, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Antioch Review, African American Review, American Literary Review, TriQuarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Gettysburg Review, River Styx, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. You can hear her online on American Weekend, a production of National Public Radio, at weekendamerica.publicradio.org, rhinopoetry.org, and at cortlandreview.com. Her work has also been chosen by former Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith to appear on NPR’s The Slowdown https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2020/05/08/379-february-my-love-is-in-another-state.Her book-length collection of poems, Zoonotic, is forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions. Her chapbook, Easy Street, was released by Dancing Girl Press in March 2021.

Cindy was born in Cleveland, Ohio and grew up swimming in the shadows of the hyperboloid cooling towers on the shores of Lake Erie. She currently lives in Utah and is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at DSU and faculty advisor of The Southern Quill. She also enjoys serving on the artistic board for the Blank Theatre in Hollywood, California and screen scripts for their Living Room Series.

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