Encore

 Rachael Ikins

 
By Rachael Ikins 

For a decade in my life the 1990s I was unable to write poetry. I remember standing in front of the file cabinet with all my collected poems. Wondering how long before someone found out I couldn’t do it any more.

Then I got off of all the psychiatric medications I was being given and rid of the therapist. After a tumultuous year with permanent neurological damage, a bankruptcy and moving, about a year after the last pill was swallowed, I felt it, the sensation of a wanting poem in my solar plexus. I ran up the field and blasted into the house to get to a pen and paper. After that I carried a small pad and pen in my back pocket and often gathered poems on my daily walks in the woods.

I did two things back then. I wrote when inspiration touched me but I also started to force myself to write to prompts. Like homework. I wanted to ensure I never lost that ability again.
Now my iPhone is always nearby ready to receive more poetry. Even in the bath tub.

During the years when poetry was mute, I wrote prose stories. Fairytales and fantasies, regular short fiction as well, which created a safe place for me and my mind to go as my world fell apart around me. Years later I found those stories in a file cabinet in another house and some became the book “Totems” (Log Cabin Books 2017.)

I didn’t go to school for writing just did it since I was 7. Like many in our group I had a gifted 8th grade English teacher who also was an author-poetry and prose. Any time I did take an English course I always showed my poems to whoever the professor was, and in one case got a grade for them in lieu of the literature class I missed due to illness.

By now I have written 15 books, poetry, young reader books, a new one is coming out in 2025. I wrote a novella or novel—publisher tells me the word count it could be a novel. That took ten years. I like Stephen King and so decided to write my own scary story. Title is “Haven” and cautions the reader “be very careful what you plant in your garden.”

In between I have written essays, short stories, articles and social media posts.

What inspired me to write these two pieces is “Composition of a Woman” which is from my poetic memoir “The Woman with Three Elbows” (Raw Earth Ink 2023) is those years when I was unable to write poetry stood like a big block in my head. Around 2021 I was taking poetry class with Craig Czury and one of his poems about his family written from the POV of a young child drawing stick figures triggered this piece.

Composition was nominated for both the Pushcart and Best of the Net, once as prose and once as poetry. I’m not exactly sure which it is, but it came out of me in one massive long surge. To heal I had to write my own history as a victor not a victim.

“Collateral Damage” was inspired when Russia invaded Ukraine and Putin’s Chief propaganda minister’s daughter was killed by a car bomb meant for him. I watched video of him crying on the news and thought “What did you expect?” I wrote one version for homework. My teacher and I worked it one-on-one for the voices of not just the father who’d lost his child. We added his wife’s voice, the daughter’s voice and because I had been watching this, we included my own father and my own voice, too. It was really challenging. By braiding and overlapping all the voices together we made it a universal story about the price of war on humans and families. At the time I was reading Carolyn Forche.

Composition of a Woman

A figure drawing class. I use charcoal sticks, draw a young woman crumpled, on her knees, arms outstretched. Teacher leans over my shoulder “Lovely, but you broke her arm.” Yes. I see now two elbows in one arm. I turn my sheet over onto the next, a man, head downcast, slight smile. Later with torn tissue I collage him into a rumpled brown raincoat. I notice he carries a brown paper bag, his lunch I wonder, in one hand. I flip the page, a girl facing away one breast pointed toward the window one arm facing forward. She doesn’t speak. I draw the man again; this time he brings a geranium plant. They never speak. He comes every day.

Flip. An angry alcoholic a woman who swallowed her dream when she married and mothered in the ‘50s. She is thin all sharp angles. Flip. Same woman leaning to one side as if whispering into someone’s ear “don’t tell anyone she sees a psychiatrist.” Flip. I outline a large soft man lounging back in his recliner, glasses, fleshed out in suit and tie he lets the girl with the broken elbows bring house plants to fill his office window.

Flip, flip, figure groupings more challenging. It’s always difficult to be the only one who isn’t drinking in a room full of drunks, blurs the lines.

My fingers blackened to the second knuckle by now, smudges on my lips and cheek, a girl on the floor, no, wait two girls in a bathroom. They’ve broken a lunch plate and try to carve lines into their arms. Later I will paint the one, a mother who lost her baby to crib death. She and her husband will found an advocacy center, but that is in the distant future.

The second was then kicked out of the nuthouse, she had been too much, you see. I used red paint and purples to emphasize this, glue on some torn tissue that looks like seaweed. She snuck off during a field trip, caught a bus home, went to the bank to get some money, caught a bus back – to the downtown bookstore for a certain volume. Hiked up to the hospital. You could tell she is the kind of person who sneaks by the way I draw her shoulders, the can’t of her head, that tumult of thoughts broiling beneath her hair.

I create hair by splitting twine, feathering it a snip of glue dabbed on. Is this putting Humpty Dumpty back together again? That was only the second time. Is it three times and you’re out or charmed?

Here she is running. I use extra strokes around the figure, her legs and arms to emphasize speed. She has stopped on her walk back from therapy to buy a bottle of
OTC sleeping pills then a Diet Coke at Burger King. Locked in the bathroom she pops the pills, chugs the soda. I draw the swan of her throat.
Went to a payphone hospital staff talked her in. No stomach pump for her, she’d saved the bottle, like a magic charm not because she wanted to die or to do a stunt. She just wanted to be done, you see that in her posture as I showed her on her bed that night. She doesn’t sleep something she finds ironic instead whiles away her splitting headache watching neon green. brilliant orange, and hot pink worms wiggling up a picture frame. 

“Am I hallucinating.” she asks the nurse who does 15-minute bad checks. “Yes.” he says.” I know they aren’t real; it was the Benadryl.”

Group Therapy acne scarred Ken of the eternally bouncing knee, his bushy ‘stashe or Sophie the parent of that mother/daughter duo a shake-n-bake evangelist, that mother fond of mouth frothing and spoken tongues. Everyone knew she’d driven the daughter crazy, an axe splitting a skull their future if they got out together.

It wasn’t worth the freezer full of ice cream sandwiches. Here she is drawn riding in a car. She had a pass to see The Exorcist” with her mom, nobody told them she had to be back by the stroke of midnight, or the coach would turn into a pumpkin. She wanted to keep her hospital bed. I draw a young man; he likes her, and she decides at 19 it is time to lose the cherry. This fellow volunteers.

Lectured by shrinks and staff alike, see her reaching to pay for the condoms and foam at the nearby pharmacy, her wrists unscarred and delicate.

His crumpled apartment, some intrusive roommates, the act so insignificant I draw her crouched on the toilet sobbing. She never wants to speak with him again. He threatens to take all of his tranquilizers; she doesn’t care she is studying a new religion. Changes her name, converts but no matter how many times she changes the sheets she still feels sick.

I draw the therapist.

An angry woman paid less than her male colleagues, a smiling, soft looking woman, body draped over bones made of PVC flowing with leaded water. How thirsty was that girl, parched. I draw her head rolled back, mouth open oblivious to the poisons in that water and then the multitude of pill bottles her husband saved in a room on the shelf in the basement. If that shrink had told her to jump off the overpass of the interstate, so befuddled was she she would have, and she would’ve said she did it for love.

The next few pages use up a whole box of charcoal black, black that rubs on your clothes-black, bad thoughts, darkness.

Well, eventually that shrink died. Here she is penciled in her coffin lips pursed. The undertaker couldn’t make them any other way. She looks like the kind of woman who would tell a person “you’ll never make it as a writer you aren’t good enough” the kind of woman who would cripple a person for greed and then send her away to a downstate hospital a serious-to-death place, disposed of, a human-shaped bag of trash. See, can you tell there is a body inside the way I did the bag?
But the girl, pen in her teeth scrambled out of the landfill. Almost died from all those chemicals. She is not the same as she would’ve been if someone had just sent her to college for English back in the day, let her be who she is. Instead, she had to learn to fight for it.
And she fought. Anger forged a molten blade of a woman. I paint with metallic silver from Golden paint Co. is that her armor. she’s lying in the snow on the side of a night mountain, sure she is having a nervous break down— whatever that means —as if nerves are some sort of car parts. They had treated her brain that marvelous mysterious organ of 100 billion cells like an engine to tinker with, throwing a little of this, a little of that. Too much tinkering under her hood, hearts break for real that way.

I use pale blue tissue for the snow that holds her like an angel and if I listen I can hear her voice over the wind. She says out loud to the woods “have your nervous breakdown nobody gives a damn, go on, then get up, get firewood and take it in for the wood stove those who depend on you wait.” Scents of wood smoke and snow.

She lost three houses, a husband, a father, mother, two cats, countless dogs, and miscarried twins. See her. I paint a woman sitting in front of a fire, a pen in her hand, pad of paper balanced on the dog between her thighs, and later I ink her in in front of an old iPad. cat curls on her shoulder, two heads sometimes better than one. See her fingers dance, you can almost hear the poetry pouring. Now I have to buy more charcoal.

 

Collateral Damage

The sound of the blast sucked all sounds into itself.
Your father, his dinner napkin still in his left hand,
his glasses on top of his head while he sits at the table
spooning borscht into his mouth,
my father, half-glasses on the tip of his nose, napkin on his knee,
legs crossed at the table, salts his canned tomato soup.
Reporters thrust microphones like weapons into your father’s face.
My father grimacing in front of the television.
All those compelling lies.
****
An IED sowed your molecules across the universe,
small canister snuck under the car.
Cell-phone set to blast at a nano beep
****
Anya asks to borrow the keys, she wants to meet a friend at the library.
I’m sneaking out in my mother’s denim jacket to kiss a girl in the June field
behind the barn.
They suspect by the way we’re dressed, perfume, shining hair that the friend might be a boy.
Soldiers die so easily, too-early flowers in a killing frost. Spring.
****
My husband kneads his head between his hands.
My husband kneaded his shoulders against my breasts.
Two crows bobbing their heads in our linden tree,
fabric scraps flutter on branches like feathers,
a third crow swoops to grab something shiny.
Call it a murder
****
A train whistle blows through an intersection every night at 6:00 p.m.
Papa, what did you think would happen?
Those people cramming trains once had no greater concerns than a forgotten phone charger or whose turn it was to take the clothes out of the dryer, lugging dogs, guinea pigs, cats…
Is it warm enough to plant lettuce yet?
****
Anya insisted on her own patch when she was seven,
I gave her a few jonquil bulbs.
A scarecrow stood guard, skeleton of a broom dressed in my plaid shirt
to protect from looters.
The wren house we bought at Home
Depot hung in the poplar where Uri and Farris buried our beloved hamster,
home to new wrens twenty springs later.
****
You could have said, “take the bus,” that you needed the car to go see your mistress.
I would’ve slapped your arm laughing.
****
These thoughts race like mice in a jar winking.
****
Soup splatters my shoes.
Sirens bleat, neighbors cluster in bouquets, white faces above fists-clutched, heads-turned-away. Eyes hurry back into our locked houses.
****
Nothing can stop the millipede that crawls
behind my eyelids—it should have been you.
****
I am upstairs, earbuds in, the teddy bear from when I was tiny
still keeping me safe,
black button eyes and fur worn off from rubbing against my lips.
We will wake up in a flash.
****
Mama smacks my shoulder, “Uri, Wake up, you’re snoring!”
****
Do you hear?
“Привет, papa.”
bursting through Spring,
the clatter of my gym shoes’ dance in the boot tray,
I steal a piece of cheese from your plate,
my breeze through displaces the air.
What is left behind? I am in love
and soon they will be taken for soldiers.