He takes me on vacations
while he’s home, transporting our state of mind from deployment life to
post-deployment lets-try-hard-for-normalcy life. ‘Let’s take a picture’ rolls
off his tongue with every other breath. Each trip he hopes will produce
pictures that will replace every frame/every profile image/every evidence of
the life I’ve led without him here.
We can live and linger
forever inside a frame.
“When was this photo
taken?”
“Who were you with here?”
“I wonder what country I was
in then.”
Seattle poet Nicole McCarthy’s full-length debut is
A SUMMONING: MEMORY EXPERIMENTS
(Manhattan KS: Heavy Feather Review, 2022), a layering of memory, trauma and erasure,
working to salvage what should be salvaged and leaving all else behind. As she
writes, early on: “Our memory palace is disintegrating before our eyes and by
our hands. By selling, we are evicting memories, leaving them to fade and be overridden
by others.” Through accumulating and even overlapping and obscured fragments of
image, scraps and lyric prose, McCarthy explores how experience changes both the
body and memory itself; living as a military spouse, she writes of deployments
that shift geography and of long absences marked across a calendar path, while
existing across the silence of an unfamiliar house. “Am I a memory romantic?”
she writes, early on. She writes a layering, overlapping series of prose-blocks,
layered to the point of illegibility, as one memory begins to obscure another,
and simultaneously; memories enough that there is nothing left but an obscured
text that folds into a textual mush. She writes an obscured text, an
overlapping text, and sections crossed-out, offering both the archive and the
erasure, attempting to both document and set herself correct, even as she
repeatedly and routinely articulates an indeterminate foundation. If she can’t
trust her own memory, how does anything else get built?
I’m a ghost unwilling to
leave these shared spaces after everyone else has vacated. My husband left
toward his new residence without a second glance back at the house we shared
for six years. I sit in front of the fireplace, in our hollow home, crying over
all that’s bound to be lost.
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