— Shout —
a poetry memoir
Laurie Halse Anderson

diagnosis

I knew that if I fell and scraped my knee

ejected headfirst through a windshield

chopped off a finger or lost a leg to a shark

I’d apply pressure to stop the bleeding

use towels, blankets, Goodwill sweaters

whatever it took to start clotting,

slow the fluid loss

I’d close my wounds with fishhooks and twine

or a stapler or a nail gun

welding torch to reconnect my spine

I’d knit skin grafts, if necessary.

After I pulled myself back together

I’d need a doctor cuz my dark corners

would be invaded

by bacteria, viruses, parasites, and more,

infectious

vectors of disease, some lethal, some merely

debilitating, chronic cripplers.

I knew that. I paid attention in health.

But I had never seen a first aid kit for the spirit

or heard the word “trauma” to describe

the way I’d hide, slide through the days unseen

or scream into the pillows

at the bottom of my closet

door closed even though no one was home.

Rape wounds deeply, splits open

your core with shrapnel.

The stench of the injury attracts maggots

which hatch into clouds of doubt and self-loathing

the dirt you feel inside you nourishes

anxiety, depression, and shame

poisoning your blood, festering

in your brain until you will do anything to stop

feeling the darkness rising within

anything

to stop feeling—

untreated pain

is a cancer of the soul

that can kill you

Salinger and me

I never thought of killing myself

not on purpose, though I was in grave danger

of a stupid accident, riding sorrow’s hamster wheel

living with a popsicle, momsicle, sisicle,

all of us frozen in confusion

me tongueless but alive

When I was little I loved Bread and Jam for Frances

the book about a fussy badger

who seemed quite sensible to me.

The author, Russell Hoban, was a fan of J. D.

Salinger—dude who wrote

The Catcher in the Rye, which is a whole

other story.

Hoban said this gobsmacking thing

about Salinger, called him “a man without eyelids”

the line always stuck with me

I was a girl without eyelids that year;

I couldn’t blink

I. saw. everything. all. the. time.

my eyes raining constantly from all the seeings,

my throat dry from lack of use

Salinger was a mess, another World War II vet

who came home with nasty memories

shoved into his head

he and my dad would have made great pals

they would have cried and fought and punched

the walls and each other when the lid came off.

We tiptoed, terrified, for years, afraid

my father would kill himself, once and for all,

but he held on, like Salinger, and showed me

that holding on was worth it.

speaking in tongues

When I was a little girl, a friend and her family

moved to the Netherlands and she had to learn

Dutch. I asked if the cows

and the chickens spoke Dutch, too.

Then my brain grew and my mouth grew hungry

for languages—I studied French and German,

tried to read a Russian dictionary.

Exchange students

roamed the halls with their mysteries,

circling in orbits

around Mr. P., my French teacher,

the only one who always smiled

at screwed-up kids like me

and looked us in the eye, like he cared

cuz he did

one afternoon Mr. P. asked me why

I hadn’t joined the International Club

he said I’d like it

(answer: because joining clubs meant being with people I didn’t know, which scared me, and I had to do that for classes, which is why I forgot to go to them a lot, but there was no way I was going to do something that stupid in my free time, no way)

I told him I was kinda busy

but I’d think about it

locker up

Sound of slamming lockers triggers

me with the spread of metal

across my tongue

as if someone pushed my face

into the steel soldiers lined against the wall,

patiently holding our books, our lunch,

decomposing bananas

and an army of fruit flies,

the combination to open sesame

always slipping past

spin the dial again until it opens, crouch

head in the dark, act

like I’m looking for something important

crowd swelling, banging riot

in the unwatched spaces

me worrying my stack of books

like I can’t hear the conversations around me

about some girl who was crying

at the back of the bus,

potato chips and retainers and tryouts,

football players

shoving jockstraps in the faces of girls

no one will defend, essays, big tits and small

dicks,

National Honor Society infighting, drama,

so much drama

I thought I was the only person this alone,

too afraid to lift my head to check, can rats get in our lockers did I leave that book at home how much longer do I have to stay and pretend to pray to this empty altar, when will the bell release me so I can flip the page of this script to the shoulder-slumping eternal sigh of time to go to class again

This is life with your head

inside the jaws

of the beast.

scrawling yawps

when I wasn’t stoned

the only thing that helped

me breathe

was opening a book

mist enveloping, welcoming

me into the gray space

between ink black and page white

leading me along to the Shire

to start the long trek to Mordor

again

questing for unknowable treasure

the majesty of Tolkien’s adventures

cast a blood spell on me

sap rose from the ground where I was rooted,

filtered through my imagination

it dripped from my fingers as ink-blotted

poetry, scrawled escape recipes

I scribbled,

writing at the speed of life

gauntlet, thrown

My high school was designed by an incarceration

specialist to make the herding, the feeding

and the slaughter proceed as efficiently as possible

that’s what we thought,

anyway

the isolated back hallway was an icicle

laid along the school’s spine,

I avoided it, cuz it was filled with jocks

but

after detention one day, at the end of ninth grade

tired of wasting my time

going the long way around

I walked down that cold hall,

itching for a fight.

A gym teacher stepped out. The short one

the intimidating one, radiating more energy

than Jean Grey on a cranky day, she pointed

her finger at me and I snapped to attention

and when she said I was a big girl

I said “yes, ma’am”

and when she said I should go out for sports

teams in tenth grade, I said

“yes, ma’am”

because I was terrified of that woman

In the fall, I dove

into the cold, bleaching water

swim practice;

my hair clean for the first time in a year,

I lost myself in underwater meditation

of lap after lap after lap after lap

and that winter I skied

in blue jeans, not caring

that I couldn’t afford snow pants,

not giving a shit what other people thought

cuz I was fast, so strong I carved my mark

on the face of the mountain

come spring, I threw shot put and sucked

at throwing discus, but I began myself again

stopped smoking

started chipping away at my concrete cage

went to class every damn day

cuz cutting classes meant I couldn’t practice

pulled my grades out of the toilet

stopped phoning in generic answers

and sleeping through class

didn’t need to, I slept

finally

at night, too worn out to entertain

the monsters in the closet and under my bed

the nightmares receded into the River Styx

for a while

I experimented with friendships

girls I met on the team,

dusting off the concrete, my fists

uncurled a bit, I stopped

being rabbit-scared

most days

God bless that short gym teacher

for caring enough

to call me out

and hold me up

candy-striped

Mom made me get a job

the summer between

ninth and tenth grades,

between silence

and nervous laughter,

burn and infection.

Anything but babysitting, I said,

and poof, I was a candy striper, hospital

volunteer wrapped in a dress with thin stripes

white and tampon-box pink,

I arrived on time five days a week

filled water jugs, delivered flowers

counted hours, fluffed pillows

snuck cigarettes to old folks

in need of a fix. The real lessons

were found in the accidents:

taking a jug of ice

into the wrong room and finding there

a new mother, holding her baby

who’d arrived so broken inside

he couldn’t be healed,

wouldn’t live long enough to be a bored

teenager, would never blow out

a single birthday candle,

the baby’s mother—not much older than me—

she asked for Kleenex and I gave it

and she grabbed my hand

I stood next to her, our fingers entwined

my eyes on the floor

felt wrong to look at her

or the baby

so we held hands

and the ice in the pitcher melted slow

to give them more time.

Another day I took files to the morgue

because computers were still waiting

to be invented. The restless dead hungry

to come back to life, that’s what it smelled like

down there, chemicals and meat. Dead-guy hand

on the edge of a table freaked me out

so much that when one of the not-dead guys—

a junior assistant lab rat or something—

asked me for my number, I gave it to him

without thinking

then sprinted for the surface.

He called me. A movie on the first date,

garlic pizza on the second;

movies and pizza was just my speed

slow, turtle-paced, with dumb jokes

and eventually a little kissing

until in the front seat of his car

he pushed my head into his crotch

frantic-fumbling with his belt buckle;

I escaped and avoided

the morgue after that.

ignorance

We didn’t get our textbooks in health

in tenth grade until the cold stripped

the trees in late November

cuz the school board ordered the books

to be gutted, they demanded that the sex

chapters be surgically removed

so explanations of the menstrual cycle

and pics of diseased penises

wouldn’t send us into frenzied orgies

in the halls or cause us to drop out

so we could do the sex all day.

The school board barred

as much practical education

as they could. Maybe they

just really liked babies and wanted us

to start breeding as soon as possible.

chronological cartography

1. I clawed my way through ninth grade breath by breath, second by second. Kids living in war zones should get extra credit just for showing up to school. The fact that my parents didn’t see how messed up I was, and how stoned I stayed to avoid dealing with what messed me up, proved they were fighting hard battles of their own. Dad was hanging on by a thread, but Mom was a warrior. She kept us alive and made sure we had a place to live—two incredible accomplishments, when you think about it. But I didn’t think about it, not then. I focused on breathing in, breathing out, then breathing in again.

2. Sophomore year, I tried to be a student, minute by minute. Sometimes hour by hour. My X-kid friends were mad cuz I wouldn’t party with them anymore. But I made friends with a girl who swam with me and she was good at discus and I threw the shot put, which landed me with the nickname Moose. I joined the International Club and went to meetings, and Mr. P. was right—I liked it. My guidance counselor was not impressed with my progress; he shook his finger in my face and yelled at me and said if I didn’t get my act together, I’d wind up in jail.

3. By eleventh grade, living hour by hour was habit and every once in a while I could see a little further ahead. I remembered to return library books. I got a job and wasn’t fired. Some of my friends’ parents didn’t like me; they could smell the desperation, the faint whiff of disaster that clung to my clothes. Whatever. I branched into the nonfiction section of the library and read about Russian history and Japanese etiquette. I wrote down important things on a calendar. I watched the musical and went to a couple basketball games, just for fun.

cardboard boxes

I visited kin in the mountains

late in high school, pinned

down in a small town; no car, no cable TV

(internet hadn’t been invented, or gaming—hell,

they barely had lights)

our choices were simple: weed, beer, or grain

alcohol mixed

with pink Kool-Aid by spotty boys eager for sex,

sad little puppies living in crumbling houses

or decomposing trailers with pregnant girls from

their algebra class

toddlers sleeping on towels on the floor,

the stench of diapers choking the dogs.

Poor kids get snatched by the real world

at seven, eight, nine years old, dragged

onto the front porch of adulthood, forced

to figure it out on their own

rarely making old bones,

a few will live to see their grandchildren chewed

up by the same machinery

then buried in cardboard boxes

I wanted a coffin made of wood

from trees not yet planted

my appetite for time was growing.

peanut butter chews

the peanut butter chews at my high school,

legendary food of the gods, were simple:

corn syrup, cornflakes, peanut butter, and sugar

mixed, plopped, and baked by badass

cafeteria ladies who understood everything

by eleventh grade, I’d shape-shifted

from a lost stoner dirtbag

to a jock who hung out with exchange students

wrote poetry for the literary magazine

and had a small group of nerdy, funny,

sweet friends to sit with at lunch

my I’m fine! mask fit snugly

I only took it off at home,

but when I shared peanut butter chews

with those friends

sometimes I forgot I was wearing it

I studied hard to keep up with them, we listened

to each other and to the same music

we ate a lot of peanut butter chews

the slant of light in the cafeteria

illuminated possibilities

I was smart enough not to tempt fate

by dating any of the guys in that group

I went out with a dude from a different school

who knew me before IT happened, a boy

who loved arguing politics and religion

as much as I did, one of the good guys.

Home was still hellish, afire

with the painful realization

that no matter how much I loved my parents

my love could not fix them

in the mythological universe of high school

cafeteria ladies are the Norns

taking our measure with a glance

seeing whom Fate would cut down early

and who needed an extra peanut butter chew

for free

I could only fix myself

high diving

Once upon a time, this fractured girl

wanted to fly

but was sore-afraid.

I watched teammates leap

off the high dive, flip

themselves into hawks

they called my name

but I chained myself in the far lane

pacing back and forth in the water

churning a wake of frustration,

still

every second stroke as I lifted my mouth

out of the water

to breathe

I opened my eyes to watch the hawks

spear the air

At meets, the diving took place in

the middle of the competition

swimmers turtled in towels on the deck

idle-watching, licking magic sugar powders

with cat tongues, as the divers flew

landing with a splash or a ripple

Once, a friend clipped her wings

on the way down, smashed

her head on the board

before she fell onto the surface

of the water,

they pulled her out, dazed and confused

scrubbed her blood off the board

my friend limped, but flew

a few weeks later, throwing herself

into the air, spinning

spearing

bruising the water

and getting up to try again

every second stroke as I lifted my mouth

out of the water

to breathe

I opened my eyes to watch

until one day my fins

began to grow feathers

germination

idea cracked the seed’s shell

skull’s cell

burrowed through the muck

surrounding my self-measured casket

clawed blindly toward light

slowly

I can’t stand this

bled

into I can’t stay here

trickled

through I should leave

swelled into

I want to leave

rose into a tidal wave

of I’m going

riding the undertow

My parents let me apply to be a foreign

exchange student

confident that I’d be rejected

but wanting me to dream

because dreaming was a tradition

at my house, we dreamed

about vacations and adventures, we dreamed

about being other people in different worlds

dreaming was our lifeboat in rough waters

the letter from the exchange program arrived

at the end of my junior year

they accepted me!

I would spend a year and a bit

(thirteen months: delicious, bewitching number)

living on a pig farm in Denmark

fluttering my untested wings

I teetered on the edge of the nest

my mother spelled out the bad news slowly

each word a hammer

because, you see, there was no money

they never thought I would make it so far

but they didn’t want to discourage my dream

dreaming never hurt, right?

Two days of tearful negotiation, isolation

rage rattled my mind’s cage in search of a solution

forty-eight hours of me standing my ground

relentless, unswayed, I planted my flag

firmly in a hand-forged reality,

if I took all of the money I’d earned

and saved for college

and my grandmother chipped in the difference

of a few hundred dollars

it would work

they talked to each other through the night

my parents did, no longer a question of cash

they weighed the cost of sending

sixteen-year-old

me

overseas to a family they’d never met

they weighed that against the dark tide

always trying to pull us under

we didn’t have many books in my house

we had maps of the Adirondack Mountains

and the state of Vermont

because that was the size of our world

in the morning, my mother took the battered

metal globe off my shelf and handed it to me.

“Where the hell is Denmark?” she asked.

“Show me where you’re going to live.”

the things I carried to Denmark

one suitcase of clothes

a small journal, undersea colors

enough birth control pills

for thirteen months

(thanks, Mom)

I packed my heart beating

rabbit-fast, my eyes

closed and waiting

the small stuffed fish as blue

as the friend who gave it to me

frozen chip on my shoulder

as big as Lake Ontario

backbone a flagpole

nerves thrumming like a scrum

of hummingbirds aloft

the cost of saying goodbye hidden

next to my scars deep in the forest

at the bottom of my gut

I packed my freckled skin, rolled

and tucked between my shinbones

I’d take it out the first night

I arrived, stretch it carefully,

that map of me,

let it rest in the moonlight

on the floor of my bedroom

a baker’s dozen of months

so I could roam skinless in the hidden

liminal sliver of fortune granted

by the gambling gods who rolled

their dice in my name.

Around my neck I wore

the Saint Christopher’s medal

given by the boy I loved

to keep me safe

it worked.