Slick Like Dark by Meg Wade 

Review by Erica Charis-Molling

As a lesbian who came out in the evangelical church, I resonated with Meg Wade’s book Slick Like Dark from its first few pages. Though coming from a different set of circumstances, the loops and layers of trauma tie themselves into familiar, artful knots at the intersections of womanhood, sex, faith, and the body. When I read,

………………………………….—Goddammit, Christ has everything to do with this:

 …………………authority of the stripped body ………………salvation 

………………………………….our necks and how easily they snap

I immediately recognize a kindred walking a frightfully similar road to recovery.  

The collection begins with the acknowledgement that carrying the violent, sexual trauma described in the first poem has exhausted the speaker. Using long lines that seem barely able to hold their own syllabic weight and fragmentation, the writer begins to coax the story forward. In a near-perfect balance of narrative and lyric elements, the poems often take up the whole page, refusing to stay neatly in the margin. “I cannot be afraid to tell it all wrong,” one early poem coaches itself and that line becomes the engine of all that comes next.

In fact, being willing to risk telling it all wrong is often a necessary piece of putting trauma into words. In the writing of such stories, negation can be an incredibly powerful tool—not only to correct, but to present two worlds at once. By writing who is not there or what did not happen, the reader can witness both the world in which what happened shouldn’t have, and the all-too-real world where it did. This is evident in lines like “This is what surviving feels like— / The fact is he didn’t kill me and now I have a long time left to live,” where the action of the assault is flipped into inaction. Or again when the speaker says

………………………………….to hold myself prisoner any longer would be foolish

………………………………….but the truth is ……………………………….I still don’t know whether or not

………………………………….I’m innocent ………………………………….I’m innocent

……………………………………………………………………..I’m innocent

where the doubts coded into the negations wrestle with the incantation of innocence.

Finding the right incantatory prayer that will finally free the body is a driving force in Wade’s work. After describing the pleading to make the assault stop, the reader is asked to “Imagine this is how you’re taught to pray.” From these first lessons, the poems work to build a different type of prayer, grown from a faith that can welcome the body and its desires. “I learned more about sanctuary from nakedness than I have in any cathedral,” a poem confesses as we begin to learn about both the “vengeful and a saving God in fucking.” Holding the church’s teachings about women’s lack of sexual autonomy while trying to reclaim one’s body is no simple task. In the poem “Young Cotton,” the speaker begs,

…………………………………………………….please god don’t see

………………………………….anything besides flesh wet purpose 

………………………………….[…]

………………………………….all the ways a pair of country knees

………………………………….can worship their way home.

But where exactly is that spiritual and corporeal home? The speaker both needs to “know if God belongs within a body” and is ready to “Take the crowbar to the pews who says we need church.” Through the friction of wanting to find a place for her faith and equally wanting to take a crowbar to the place that faith has previously called home, a spark of possibility springs to life. “Desire is a miracle” one poem attests; “Deliverance begins with the body / and sweeps outward…” another poem declares. A new and different sort of faith begins to emerge—one grounded in the body rather than in any particular conceptions of sin or innocence. From such faith, the self in these poems lay another layer in the hard work of healing. Alongside the speaker we roll up our sleeves knowing 

………………If the hands are dirty that means they’re working,

………………………………….tender and building

………………a place where I can love a man again. 

This is messy and bewildering work in a world where we find “poison, love, forgiveness, all of them / looking the same, the same.” This is just as problematic for the survivor who tries to learn to love themselves. “If the saying’s true,” we read in “The Defense”:

……………………………………………………………………..if you love someone 

………………………………….you should get to know them as best you can………………………then I’ve tried— 

 ………………………………….[…]

………………………………….I was just trying to take my body back.

The traumatized body won’t be taken back easily. Still the poems urge the speaker forward to say or write our way into the tension, reminding us each step of the way that “If something is beautiful / it’s fighting…” This fight belongs to the survivor, the poems affirm, but slowly we begin to see that it is work that need not be done alone. In “The Ambulance Outside isn’t Really a Moving Truck” we read: “Yes, it’s the fisherman who finally cuts the thing / open, but it’s always been up to her to crawl out / of the dark.” This midwife-fishman isn’t the only partner we encounter along the way. Through floods and uprootings and bridges collapsing, we learn and relearn that “no we do not always drown alone.” 

Through skillful use of negation, the poems begin to reach out asking for help, affirmation, and compassion. The end of “Ditch Tender” pleads: 

………………………………….Says she’s not better off

……………………………………………………………………..dead than lost […]

………………………………….Say she won’t surrender ………………………..here. 

………………………………….Say if she does, you won’t ………………………blame her.

This unidentified “you,” which at times seems to be a friend, a lover, or even the reader themselves, becomes an increasing presence as the chapbook draws to its close. Addressing them directly, the speaker writes “My Love / sometimes we can’t choose what we save. // We just can’t choose.” Yet, while the speaker knows the relationship itself may not survive, the openness and willingness to be in a relationship—both with one’s own body and with the body of another—begins to open doors that might otherwise be locked.

Slick Like Dark ends seemingly as it began. Desire, hell, and violence still tangle up in one another and exhaustion remains a heavy presence over it all. But the final poem interrupts itself to say, “I don’t want it to end this way.” So how, in the mess of continued recovery, do we change the ending? Wade suggests the everyday action of one person handing another a can opener, not so much as an answer but as a gesture. Nothing here is finished, but the trajectory has shifted, pointing us toward a “way no one has to die.” Instead of battling the body—her own and the body of the other, as she was in the room of the first poem—she allows the body to rest and take solace in the simple presence of another. “This way we’re just two people lying / down on opposite sides of the kitchen floor.” This is not a miraculous healing, but rather an invitation. An invitation that feels enough like church to me, that I can’t help but whisper back “Amen.”

Erica Charis-Molling is a lesbian poet, educator, and librarian. Her writing has been published in literary journals including Relief, Tinderbox, Redivider, Vinyl, and Entropy. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in the 2021 Orison anthology. A Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, she received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch University. Her chapbook, How We Burn, will be published as a part of the Robin Becker Series by Seven Kitchens Press in Spring 2022.

16 March 2022