Refusal

Poems

Jenny Molberg

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780807173459
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Refusal, her searing new collection of poetry, Jenny Molberg draws on elements of the uncanny—invented hospitals, the Demogorgon of Dungeons & Dragons, an Ophelia character who refuses suicide—to investigate trauma, addiction, and forces of oppression. Exposing the effects of widespread toxic misogyny, this confrontational volume examines societal, cultural, and personal gaslighting in situations of domestic abuse. As Molberg writes in "Loving Ophelia Is, " "love and hate simultaneously is the trick of abuse / and the trick of abuse is a vexation of the mind." A sequence of epistolary poems looks to friendship as a safe haven from violent romantic relationships, while another series on a mother's struggle with addiction captures the complicated nature of a parent-child relationship affected by alcoholism. Refusal seeks to break silences and to interrogate a cultural misogyny that weighs heavily on a woman's position in the world.

i.

Note

He said he would hang himself

so as not to make a mess.

But he was still there the next day.

And the next. And the next.

He wrote the note for the cops

on a page he tore from my favorite book

of poems. That’s all I saw of it—

in absence—the ripped-out page

like a jagged fin down the spine.

What is my body but a rainstorm?

What are my bones

but flightless shards of light?

I did not feel secure,

though I married the only man

I believed was safe. Two children.

Three dogs. The dying cat.

Papers signed and unsigned.

The woman who pasted her face

over mine in our photos

and mailed them as proof of their affair

before she tried to kill herself.

This, too, he does not tell me.

In the dream, he cuts

the air around my body

with a giant pair of scissors,

origamis me

until I am small as a ring box.

In I go, with the rest

of my clothes, to the cardboard crate

where dress-sleeves stick out

like the arms of paper dolls. I nestle there.

I fold and fold. I try to disappear.

Epistle from the Hospital for Cheaters

to C.C.

What to do with all this flame but douse it

with paper cups of red and yellow pills?

What to do with the sun that licks its rose blaze

across the tiled corners of this ward,

with all these hours, with the burden of relief

we’re allowed to feel? We still breathe.

We still walk the halls in our spoiled bodies.

Once, we made a promise in that world

of papers and rings and aisles

that meant cold prison cell, that meant

debt and paranoia and many small failings

that took root as we stood in front of judges

and priests, our teeth crawling with ’til death.

Gold light razors the plastic blinds.

Don’t we look so flawed, so lovely? Alone forever

doesn’t mean shit anymore. Tell me

I didn’t blow up my life for this means you get

dark chocolate and a long hug. The food here

is delicious, and we’re all going to be fine.

Here, no one cuts your face out of all the photos.

There are no photos. We won’t remember this place.

Here, we rede...