solace
colleen mills
Vine Leaves Press
Melbourne, Vic, Australia | Athens, Attica, Greece
Solace (ˈsɒl ɪs)
[1 transitive verb] to give comfort or healing from shame
to ease through sharing
[noun] relief found from affliction
alleviation
For the Seven,
and for the many.
They talked about how it was both beautiful and horrible. They
wondered together if there could be a word for this fearful symmetry in any language. A word for this emotion that combined
intense, awful loss with recognition of continuing and endless
beauty despite, perhaps even caused by, the loss.
Juliana sPaHr, tHE transfOrMatiOn
Part I
Ashes
Colleen Mills
There is a house with wood stained siding,
a shale driveway lined with daffodil planter boxes,
an old oak tree and swing,
and, inside my father’s stove. Cast iron.
Good for drying wet innards of small shoes,
sinewy threads woven into damp socks,
the slippery cold of ice on bark.
These small, steaming piles beneath its belly
rest down memory’s dark corridors
just where we left them all those years ago.
The house thick with burnt wood, wet wool, orange peels,
and waking.
The ticking of a clock.
One of my brothers pulls a flannel sheet over his head;
the other fills his pillow with sweat each night in the bunk below.
I’ve been lying awake inside this dark hour of morning
as if I’m a doll on the stage of a small doll house,
laying very still in my bed with my eyes closed.
I imagine that I am a ghost of a child
because that is what I am:
both then and now.
I am both the space around my body and the hollowness
within.
I am and have always been.
I am and will always be.
A shadow of a thing. A passing over. The knowing of absence,
of being only two watching eyes shifting beneath slits in the flesh.
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Solace
Down the hallway my father sits in the living room
reading the paper from his armchair,
feet extended, TV news on repeat—
underwear,
socks pulled to the ankle,
a work shirt open at the collar.
This is how my memory returns to him,
returns in the quiet moments between thoughts,
returns on a small whisper of air sucked sharply through the lips.
The heart knows well that it can only forget
the things it never really cared about.
Some nights
my sister and I place our toes on the cold basement floor.
We slip quietly up the stairs to listen through the railing.
Beginnings are never clear.
Where we are coming from, what we are moving toward—
memory holds onto fragments, loops them back together.
Late nights from the stairwell
we listen, see, burn these scenes into the empty.
The pores of the orange peels
we placed on a stove to scent the house,
seam split fleur de lis stitched into the cording of the sofa,
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Colleen Mills
black on the left arm of my father’s armchair
where we pressed a lighter,
and, beneath, my mother’s needle tips,
strung and pointing out of her basket.
I placed these markers here like breadcrumbs for me to find me.
A single off-white thread intertwined
through the story of seven children’s tangled strings.
We are loose threads that hang in the quiet.
Tear them out, untwine them from the knitting needles,
try to follow their knotted pathways
and make something of it all—
but understand too that a line straightened stretches to infinity
and its journey is never ending.
One pulled strand unravels, brings us back,
loosens other memories we didn’t plan to remember.
Even now we are there still,
all of we seven children
our knots tied off inside the egg thin shells we built—
there in my mother’s knitting basket by my father’s chair,
oysters ever tending our grains of sand.
From the gutters and rhododendrons outside
Come the weighted yawns of slush-thud,
steam fogs the panes, the sun burns low beneath the horizon.
It is the morning after the night before.
12
Solace
Time shifts through seams of dusk and daylight,
snow and rain: sand through the fingers,
the strand of yarn pulled through the room by a breeze
passing over the many points of reference that link a memory
that is never now or then or will be
but a thing that swallows the blankness between.
It is the night before the many mornings after,
before oil rising from the pores of orange peels on a black stove,
before the smell of ashing wood and puckering coffee.
In our bedroom, my sister’s sleeping face
is pale in the florescence of a nightlight.
Her porcelain skin cracked along the nose ridge by the shadows.
It is almost dawn now,
and I am writing this to you
in a small pink diary under my bed,
broken key-lock swaying as I scribble.
The words I write here slide through my body
from the black ink of many nights combined,
creep up the bones of my fingers
slip out in script of crooked hand.
They rise up like scratches,
the reversed seeping of a stain.
So much of what we say unfolds within what we don’t say,
lays itself open in pause.
Silence—
a conversation of absence,
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Colleen Mills
a mouth that has been stitched closed with a threadless needle,
inertia, moments of ceasing to exist before we reappear.
On the thin pink lines of my childhood diary I write:
The shadow of my sister’s pupil looking at mine.
The way her back slightly arches away
as she stands by my father’s chair.
The yellow brown tint of lamplight across the room.
Her pants around her ankles.
A worn belt, held buckle out, in my father’s hand.
I began this broken story then in a broken-lock diary.
Even now I am telling a story without telling the story.
There will be lips moving but no sound;
there will be flashes shaken like dice in a tumbler
and tossed on the pages like paint.
There will be a loudness so noiseless in its passing
that you will begin to know how to feel the meaning of silence.
I’ve decided to leave you this boxful of missing puzzle pieces.
Your eyes must add up the glances, place them in order
like a flip bookjump from here
to there—
to there
Hopscotch. You are the wormhole,
the holder, the blinking in between.
We are on a tan couch, stamped blue fleur de lis.
14
Solace
My older and younger brothers sit on either side of me.
I hear their chests rising and falling.
Our hands on laps, eyes straight ahead.
Green curtains, wood panelled walls.
The smell of iron and sweat rising from our skins.
We do not look at each other
in the living room, or between the lines
where I write this while hiding under my bed
in the early afterward.
Only the eyes speak, so we blink, close them, look away.
In your hands you hold the picture stain of a small girl
juxtaposed, watermarked.
I am both here in the dawn light of a page and there in the night,
my thin voice pressed into your dark and quiet corners.
Take the pieces of broken puzzle,
collage the words into a then and now
until you see an image so true it never existed.
Late nights my sister’s eyes are blue—
phantoms that glow from deep beyond the nightlight.
I do not comfort her, and she does not comfort me.
In our twin beds, each from across the room,
we lay on our sides and face each other.
This is as close as we can be.
In her eyes, I see my father’s eyes looking back,
and so we act as if he can see all.
When we hear his footsteps above,
we dare not look too long.
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Colleen Mills
In my dreams, my small pencil-gripped fist always seems detached, swaying on paper, as if I am sitting across the room on
my sister’s mattress without my hand.
The ink bleeds from me like the oily winged shadow of a crow,
an image contracted in the pool of your right-left flicking irises
as you read this now, as you peek at my hand moving on paper
under my childhood bed, when you saw my knees dangling
from the couch as you peered into my living room.
You see my insides laid out here as blueprints, my heart’s
skeleton beating. You will think you know, feel how it was, but
that too is the mind’s illusion.
Look inside this scene of shadow box family portrait,
hold the images we hold:
four sets of legs dangling over the couch ruffling,
the sway of the curtain in the evening breeze,
the thick calluses of my father’s hands,
his browning cracks of nail bed.
We are both longing and afraid.
When he is done, this time,
my sister’s naked bottomed skin is split and raised,
a faint blue clouds the pale.
The sawed-edged piece of 2 X 4
has tumbled to the floor with her body.
Her eyes are still looking at mine
from where she lays open-legged.
My palms are sweating when I write this.
My stomach and elbow skin cling to the linoleum.
16
Solace
I look away
when he grabs her by the ankle,
drags her across the floor,
flies her thin frame off the landing
and down the basement stairs.
We hear only the final slap of a body against concrete
before he walks to the couch, pulls the next by a fist of hair,
knees clanking, to the ground.
We make no sound.
We are eyes.
Not living in our bodies.
Skin without mouths.
Words are dangerous.
Sound is dangerous.
He can hear our whispers,
see our thoughts as clearly as if typed on this page,
so we try not to form them, try to stay blank between the ears.
A memory has no body, makes no print in the snow.
It is heavy and weightless, an internal shadow
wrapped up like a sinking stone.
Even as we remember, we let the past slip away.
We edit the stories we tell.
Create a life that skips across the water.
My father says this never happened, and so we leave it out.
Slide on our sneakers and stand at the bus stop.
We start each morning new, even after we are grown.
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To purchase Solace: A Mem-
oir in Verse, by Colleen Mills,
please visit our website.