Back to Issue 13.

Summer, 2003

Mollie O'Leary

The staple went unnoticed, stunning
the soft underside of my foot. The skin 

punctured, pliant as the orange rind
mouldering in my sour lunch box. 

The metal wedge appeared, a sudden
secret, one of the big kinds meant 

for buildings, flush with the flat arch
of my foot. I paused, unable to say 

I was hurt. It was the weekend. 
I felt light-headed and important 

limping into the house. I climbed
on the kitchen counter, eye-level 

with my father, the wet wooden smell of
sweat and beer warming in a tall glass. 

His teeth were butterscotch in color,
front ones eroding, nearly translucent. 

I looked at my father, a surgeon whose
hands knew the damage pain can plant 

in a body, whose hands may have held
softness, though I had no proof. I wanted 

to be good, to sit still during the procedure
but when he touched my skin, the burning 

broke me like a rotted branch. I begged
him to stop, thought I might die, wondered 

what would kill me first: the pain or
my inability to hide it, this new wound 

opening in me like the wings of a moth
dropped in water. Yet I also trusted

I would live, and I was ashamed, not
by my failure to be brave, but by 

my secret belief that my father was
someone who would protect me.

FAQ ad absurdum

Q: Without your trauma, would you still be a poet?
1. Biscuit tins can be easily repurposed. 
2. A child keeps a biscuit tin under her bed,
containing a pendant of the Virgin Mary, 
a drawing she wants to give her grandfather,
who is dead, and five dollars for emergencies.
3. The child loves to eat biscuits.

Q: Do you write any happy poems? 
1. Fiberglass insulation looks like cotton candy.
2. The child has trouble distinguishing between
safe and unsafe forms of touch. 
3. The child either goes to bed covered in sugar
or covered in glass.

Q: What does family mean to you? 
1. Flying fish, adapting to momentarily leap
out of water as a means of escape, occupy
a space between cod and bird. 
2. The child is a pleasure to have in class,
though she often hides in bathroom stalls
during dictation tests. 
3. The child hopes to one day grow wings
like a flying fish.

Q: Will you ever move on from this? 
1. Some people do not remember the exact
amount of money in their wallets. 
2. The child often steals money from her father’s
wallet and sneaks it into her mother’s wallet.
3. The child, as the integer one, multiplied by the
value of any dollar bill in the wallet will return
that same number, over and over.

Q: Are you grateful it wasn’t worse? 
1. Children don’t like to clean their rooms.
2. The child likes to clean her room so it will be tidy on
the off chance that she dies in her sleep and a
coroner needs to collect her. 
3. The child is not a child.

Q: Does having a positive mindset help?
1. Reality is unbearable (P) 
2. The child learns to bear this reality (Q)
3. If P is true or Q is true, and P is false, then Q is
true, but the child exists if and only if P is
true.

Seeking Place

I can only explain it like this: when I was a child I sought
small rooms, dark closets with dusters, old feathered ones
that threatened to sour in the shadows, to turn into something
unspeakable. I waited until sound slowed, my mind righted. 

I hadn’t yet learned about burrows, the way some animals create
passages underground that fan out like fingers into earthen rooms,
each hollow chamber an argument etched in favor of survival.
One room is just for listening, right below ground, close enough 

to hear footsteps pause, to feel the earth buckle overhead.
Another room, a place to go when the storm breaks, stays dry
even in rising water. I spent so much time bracing for this, for
the flood, but the rain has a radius that can’t be outrun. 

No, let me put it another way. I kept journals for years, considered
this a type of protection, awoke one day to find them all missing.
Months later, every small book came back, mailed, no return address.
I realized the only way to make them mine again was to destroy them 

a second time, shred each one into a memory accessible to me
alone. It was then I began to see childhood as a place without
walls. I was young, felt everything as teeth to bone. I built what
I could with what I found. The rest I had to leave exposed.

Writer’s Notebook

These poems are part of a manuscript on childhood, and memory more broadly, that I am working on for my MFA thesis. I am indebted to my workshop peers who saw and helped improve earlier drafts of these poems. I am interested in memory, both as a collective and individual experience, and how it shapes our relationships and the stories we tell each other. Relatedly, I am interested in revisiting moments from childhood, not to reanimate past traumas or fears, but to give the child a voice and a poetic structure to exist within. Since trauma can be very disruptive to the idea of a self and the linearity of "growing up," the landscape of a poem creates coherence and agency not available at the time. Thank you to the editors of COUNTERCLOCK for giving these poems a home.

about the writer