Heather Aimee O'Neill's Memory Future

I started reading Memory Future when I was moving out, in between packing boxes. I’d reward myself with a poem or two, until packing boxes became me, sitting on my air mattress, reading the opening poem, “Certainty,” over and over. The poem begins like this:

“Jess would ask Lewis Carroll for a word
for word translation of Jabberwocky

or Buffalo Bill where he hid the gold.
Laure-Anne would ask Mary Magdalene

if she and Christ were lovers.
Anthony would ask Him:

Will you help me?”

Will you help me? I read, again and again. To say that I felt understood would be an understatement. I felt comforted by these words, but at the same time, I felt unsettled, unsafe. And there is a realness to that emotional tug-of-war I appreciate.

*

I kept this book with me after I moved out, too.

I kept it with me while traveling through California, New Mexico.

In a way, these poems became part of me. Of course everything you read becomes part of you in some way in that it affects you, but there are few books out there I consider friends.

Memory Future came into my life at a time I needed it most, when I was traveling West, traveling alone. I left Orlando to find a home within myself, to be able to understand how to use my sadness and anger to create happiness. Whenever I felt alone in my emotions, I’d pick up Memory Future and read from it, and it felt like the person I always needed was there, listening to me. I remember reading “From the Platform” while I was on a train to New Mexico:

“But you look straight ahead into

the dark lines of the tunnel,
book resting on your lap, eyes
full of the hazel green in your scarf.

You could live without me.”

It hurts, accepting this “living without.” And that’s what I love about O’Neill’s poetry the most, the pain that comes forth through her strong, declarative language. Her language is muscular, but also flexible. She delves into the love present in all stages of life, from childhood to adulthood, and she depicts this love in a way where happiness and sadness rely on each other. Both can be heavy, harsh.

“Living without” can be especially harsh. But there is a freedom there, in that without.

*

I am back in Florida, now, trying to re-invent my idea of home again, from the inside (of the body) out (beyond the yard, the fence, the road).

I still keep Memory Future in my handbag, knowing those words are still there if I need them.

Today I looked to “Winter in Spain” for assurance in my belief that travel can help heal, that home is bigger than what we see, that home encompasses not only space, but time. That partnership is not enough to build a home, and neither is travel. Something else needs to be present alongside these things. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s beautiful.

“. . . We talk and light a cigarette,
because we can, until the quick collapse
of poles and planks and us and we begin
again. I press her hand to mine and watch.”

What Makes These Five Chapbooks All Belong Under One Cover?

Early in his short story “The Black Cat,” Edgar Allan Poe has his unreliable narrator declare, “And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of Perverseness.”

“Who,” he asks, “has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?”

This spirit of perverseness -- this counter-intuitive yet irresistible impulse toward the icky, the ridiculous, the self-destructive -- is at least part of what cannot be contained in the collections that make up the anthology They Could No Longer Contain Themselves.

In each of the five chapbooks that comprise this book, various characters find themselves engaging in activities which might make the reader agree with Poe that “perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart -- one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.”

To wit: In John Jodzio’s Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever, the narrator of “The Two Malls” says, “Sometimes at the expensive mall, I buy a cup of soda from the hot dog stand and then balance it on the aluminum railing.  I walk away to the other side of the mall and I wait until someone below is about to walk underneath the cup.  I hit the railing as hard as I can and the railing vibrates and the cup dumps onto the person below.”

In Mary Miller’s Paper and Tassels, the narrator of “My Old Lady” says, “Mama likes it when you slap her, I said, and his eyes narrowed like he didn’t remember mama liking that but he reared back and did it anyway.  My eyes leaked into her pillow.  Then it hit me: the pillowcase had been washed in Gain.  When he finished, he pulled out and said daddy didn’t really like that and I said mama didn’t really like it either, she just wanted to see what it felt like.”

In Elizabeth Colen’s Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake, the narrator of “Rule of Thirds” says “Today my girlfriend and I had sex while a man took pictures in the back yard, I start, in a letter to my mother. This letter is not really intended for her, though when I start I pretend it is.”

In Tim Jones-Yelvington’s Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There, the narrator of “Slime Me” says “Abner was a child who wanted to get slimed. He hungered for the spread of slime across his skin, his favorite the viscous kind that crept to cover, coat, encase. He oozed homemade do-it-yourself Mad Scientist slime though his fingers and hoped someone would cover him in goop.”

And finally, in Sean Lovelace’s How Some People Like Their Eggs, the narrator of “Wal-Mart” says “‘I don’t know a girl named Kristen!’ I shout. (I do.) ‘I never touched her!’ I shout. (I did.)”

The pleasure of reading each section of this book is inextricable from the pleasure of knowing what’s good and choosing what’s bad, of knowing the right thing and doing the wrong one. Poe called this compulsion “the imp of the perverse” and the characters in these stories are certainly driven by this demon. But in the hands of Jodzio, Miller, Colen, Jones-Yelvington and Lovelace, this impulse is revealed to be an inseparable piece of what makes humans so human.