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Jagged with Love

Jagged with Love JAGGED WITH LOVE/Susanna Childress The year my father stopped yelling, I began to see a counselor. I cried to her, all the buds of forgiveness stubborn as flax, the color of a forgotten wall, having burrowed for years, and now with the coaxing of this woman, psalmist's verse, dry-erase board, I wept stupidly, like a girl who's torn the head from her doll, meaning to. My nightmares recurred. I stopped sleeping, stopped eating meals, only the forkfuls I could muster while my roommates gawked. I stayed days in my room and found music that cried with me, for pity's sake, the blue stomachache of life, life shorn up as a skull. My counselor kept mentioning the mortal coil, and here I was, she said, somewhere between Eeyore and catatonia. How's your sex drive, she'd ask, and, The centipede in your dreams still speaks? One day a sign outside her office building says, Watch for falling tar. We start in on the fainting spells, the one and only slap, the first time he called me a whore. Men on the roof keep throwing over bags of powder, their tools, their helmets flag past the window and hit the ground http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Missouri Review University of Missouri

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Publisher
University of Missouri
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by The Curators of the University of Missouri.
ISSN
1548-9930
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

JAGGED WITH LOVE/Susanna Childress The year my father stopped yelling, I began to see a counselor. I cried to her, all the buds of forgiveness stubborn as flax, the color of a forgotten wall, having burrowed for years, and now with the coaxing of this woman, psalmist's verse, dry-erase board, I wept stupidly, like a girl who's torn the head from her doll, meaning to. My nightmares recurred. I stopped sleeping, stopped eating meals, only the forkfuls I could muster while my roommates gawked. I stayed days in my room and found music that cried with me, for pity's sake, the blue stomachache of life, life shorn up as a skull. My counselor kept mentioning the mortal coil, and here I was, she said, somewhere between Eeyore and catatonia. How's your sex drive, she'd ask, and, The centipede in your dreams still speaks? One day a sign outside her office building says, Watch for falling tar. We start in on the fainting spells, the one and only slap, the first time he called me a whore. Men on the roof keep throwing over bags of powder, their tools, their helmets flag past the window and hit the ground

Journal

The Missouri ReviewUniversity of Missouri

Published: Jan 25, 2005

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