Over the course of a year the memory had a different shape every time I studied it. As if a beam, as if an arc.
I wanted my mother to leave him.
Over the course of a year, I studied the sun and adjusted the cut—as the sunlight went across it, it defined an arc.
I remember my mom told me, “He threw the dog off the back porch.” I remember holding Hildy, stroking her fur, eyeing the eight-foot drop.
MOM: He did throw her. But I never would have told you that.
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“Hildy!” Mom called, and her dog came bounding.
But when Charlie yelled, the dog hid behind a chair, scratched the wall until her paws bled.
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In the washer I found their shirts all tangled in a knot. The knot of marriage? When the ends are pulled, it becomes so strong that the rope will break before the knot comes undone. An image that terrified me.
But the mind can smooth a jagged intake of breath. Change the knot in the washer, the shirts on the line, the flattened note. Bend the grass where horses graze.
Admit light where there was none.
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When Hildy scrounged for scraps in the garbage, we would scold her in a deepening voice. “Shame, shame.” Head on the floor, she would whimper, covering her eyes with her paws.
MOM: Emily, Hildy never ate from the trash; she was the easiest dog.
How does Hildy feel eating from the trash when she never ate from the trash? How do the other dogs feel going unmentioned, unnamed? Why are there sinkholes in memory? How does Hildy feel not eating from the trash when she loved to eat from the trash?
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MOM: I told myself, “This person has a temper and then calms down.”
In order to survive, the brain normalizes it, then atrophies.
The feelings [ I ] buried, the self [ I ] abandoned, made a puppet of [ me ].
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Mom told me about the “Is Your Partner Abusive?” quizzes she took online. Clicking ovals as she remembered: “Does he isolate you from family?” “Does he withhold attention from you when he doesn’t get his way?” “Does he not seem to notice or care how you feel?”
A: It happened all the time.
B: It didn’t happen at all.
C. It neither happened nor didn’t happen.
D. All of the above.
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“Were you really where you said you’d be?” Charlie said and pushed her to the bed. Clouds gathered outside the window.
“This is not the life I imagined,” Mom tells me.
Anesthesia for the moment. Anesthesia for the pain.
The anesthesiologist’s line: “Don’t worry, you won’t remember this when you wake up” is precisely what worried me. I didn’t remember. What else had I missed?
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Comfort was putting one’s face in the dog’s soft fur.
When the globe spun slowly, the continents on their crustal plates appeared separate. Viewed from the distance of the moon, each of us is to Earth what atoms are to our bodies. There is no other.
MOM: I couldn’t see a way out.
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The sweaters, too, had changed. Shrunken beyond recognition. When my sister and I tried ours on, they didn’t fit anymore.
Where is “thingness” to be found?
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When he spoke at my mother instead of with my mother. When I spoke at him instead of with him—
When I believe I ends somewhere and beyond it there are others, there goes the spacious quality of the mind.
There go the stars.
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MOM: He could only hold it in for so long. Exploding at the dog or whatever, it came out.
Though I didn’t count how many times, I am sure the dog scratched the walls of the house. Look here, behind the chair.
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“Remember that?” I said to Mom.
As if scratching the house of memory. As if in a memory I once believed.
I know this is true: The arc followed the beam of light.
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Emily Carlson is the author of Majestic Cut (forthcoming, 2026) and chapbooks including Why Misread a Cloud, winner of the 2022 Sunken Garden Chapbook Award, and I Have a Teacher, winner of the 2016 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition. Their writing has appeared in journals including Fence, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, Speculative Nonfiction, and swamp pink. Emily directs Art in the Garden, an LGBTQ-led, joy-centered program, teaches high school poetry, and with friends runs the Bonfire Reading Series. This is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Majestic Cut. Preorder here (20% discount).
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nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist and writer based on unceded Piscataway land in Baltimore. They’re the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and the author of you stupid slut, random access memory, pool paintings, and others. Their artwork has been exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Photography, ICA Baltimore, and Blackrock Center for the Arts.
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