Writing: Better Than Peeing Under the Piano

By Issue 6 contributor Rachel Mehl

My boyfriend used to have a Boston terrier named Bubba who would pee under the piano when his family would clean the house. After my mother got into a cleaning mood I would go through the trash and take out possibly useful things: stubs of crayons, paper clips.

I still hoard things, especially things that are broken. I feel guilty, like it is up to me to fix them. Instead I hide them in boxes with other things. I also hold on to things I can’t identify, odd Barbie shoes, letters, handwriting samples of boys I stalked in high school.

Today I threw away a half used container of foot powder I had had since my sophomore year of high school (1995).  It still had the $2.15 price tag on it, but I knew it was from 1995 because that was the year I started going to the chiropractor in the same building as the pharmacy where I got the foot powder. Not an exciting tidbit, but a piece of my life.

There’s the other stuff I can’t keep in boxes in my closet: the drinks I used to make with Oregon Springs vodka and the Costco sized box of Otter Pops in my ex-boyfriend ’s freezer, his autistic daughter, my childhood horses, the tattoo of a man I was once obsessed with, mornings after seizures, my father.

These are the things I put in poems. I know that there is no shortage of poems in this world, and I know I will never be the next Billy Collins. I am comforted by Elizabeth Bishop, whose complete poems number 103, excluding translations and juvenilia. It is not the “I wrote a poem” but the “I put something that had been haunting me to rest” that makes me jump up and sing. Writing a poem is a lot of work. Getting one published is even harder. What makes it worth it is calming the stuff I cannot forget.

I’m reminded of Joseph Millar’s poem “Dark Harvest.” He does this calming beautifully. He is speaking to a lover, but also to the reader, unloading, yet gaining trust: “I’ll bring all the bottles of gin I drank by myself and my cracked mouth opened partway/ as I slept in the back of my blue Impala dreaming of spiders” and then “…or the trembling lower jaw of my son, watching me/ back my motorcycle from his mother’s driveway one last time, the ribbons and cone-shaped birthday hats/ scattered on the lawn the rain coming down like broken glass.”

LAR is proud to have published Rachel Mehl’s poems “Letter to Amber in November” and “Toy World,” which was called the most powerful poem in LAR Issue 6 by The Review Review. Rachel seeks a home for her collection Why I Hate Horses.