Magicicada by Claire Millikin
Unicorn Press (2024)
Softcover, $18 (103 Pages)
ISBN 978-0-87775-161-8
available from Unicorn Press http://www.unicorn-press.org/
In the cicada, Millikin has found an apt metaphor for the burrowing and burying, the waiting and the bursting out from protective gestation and hibernation into the song all rape, incest, and abuse survivors must sing before they are allowed to transform. Before they are allowed to even begin healing, begin living. That long and repetitive cycle is mimicked justly in these poems. Millikin’s artful use of “Broods” to separate and gather poems of different experience and stages of her childhood echo the cicada’s long 17 years of burial and ascension. But the poems do not rise into some hollow holiness or healing. They do not ask for retribution or acceptance. There are no gods to impart forgiveness here either. They are tough, brutal poems really, and they ask only one thing from the reader and from the poet herself; they ask only for straight up, spoken admission. In fact, they demand it:
At nautical dusk you can no longer separate
the present from the past,
terrestrial trace. Admit it,
you know exactly what happened.
(from “Civil, Nautical, Astronomical”)
In their frankness, these poems without emotion, without an ounce of romanticism or sentimentality admit the stark reality of a painful past. In “Field of Vision” Millikin objectively states:
… rape opens your eyes
never to close again.
As if studying her past under a microscope and pinning it to a collection of truths the way we pin insects and butterflies, Millikin, as the better poet, is after more than the personal truth. She is mapping out a broader one. A truth that fits more than her own body. And she believes in detailed specifics.
For those who were raised by mothers who did not protect their children from husbands who violated them. Raised by mothers who ignored the truth and punished the child instead of the perpetrator. For those whose silence, anorexia, and truancy was not questioned, but punished instead with more abuse. These poems seek to call and lay out in black and white a broad, more encompassing truth: Details and specifics matter. No one passes ‘go’ unless they can name the poison, name the criminal, and also the weapon that made the wounds. In “Succor” she recalls a trauma that has shaped and directed her life in just such detached, specific detail:
You don’t spend seventy-seven days
in solitary confinement at age fourteen
without the need to say this
is what it was, your fifteenth birthday
in solitary’s
hard human sky.
Where you learned to sing
without a congregation.
As tough as some of these poems are to read, and though some of them leave us flinching, the poet shapes a subject that could easily be sensationalized or sentimentalized, guides it instead into truths that extend beyond the personal into the political. Sprinkled throughout, some truths expose and bleed into the social culture of the American South where “…enslaved sharecroppers are buried in unjust graves…”, and some extend to violent histories as far away as Indonesia even. All the while, the cicadas rise and sing their unremitting song throughout this book, just as these truths are spoken and repeated until they become their own living rhythm and refrain. And if there is any criticism to be had here, one might wish for more poems about how the selfish ignoring of pain and the terrible punishing of innocent truth connect, provide a background music to all social crimes and war. But I will not fault such a creative book for that. I would say the book more than fulfills its goal of acknowledgement and more than pins the truths of a traumatic childhood into a collection. I would also describe these haunting poems exactly as the poet herself has described the cicadas in one of the final poems called “School Shoes”:
…In the cicada’s last singing…
their burning song without fire,
their weighted notes without heft,
neither stay nor vanish
but become the unshod
school of remembrance.