In “Magicicada,” A Voice Long Buried Emerges and Sings https://ift.tt/AF3UgVR
The psychosocial impact of childhood trauma takes years to untangle and recover from. In Magicicada, which is titled after the genus of cicadas, Claire Millikin maps trauma to the cicadas’ cyclical lives of “burial and ascension.” Cicadas spend most of their lives underground, voiceless and in the dark, a fitting metaphor for those who have experienced childhood trauma, and emerge in 13- or 17-year cycles, trilling their sharp, congregational song. This collection offers an intimate series of poems that follows one speaker’s experience as she learns to break free from the code of silence she was coerced into as a child. In the dysfunctional family dynamic of this world, the speaker’s father is abusive while her mother is indifferent, choosing to spare the family reputation rather than protect her daughter. While this is a serious collection, it isn’t somber; there’s hope and strength that arises out of the natural cycle of growing up, taking flight, and finally finding one’s voice.
Set in the contemporary South, Magicicada sometimes references the antebellum period that shaped the culture, as seen in the imagery of declining refinery and social expectation of acquiescence from women. In the poem “Caryatid,” the grandeur of classical Greek architecture survives, but it’s “broken and strong, outlasting / interior rooms, so exposed.” These columns of women hold up the home, even as they face “the rapid stare of the winds, and human misuse.” Caryatids parallel the women in the speaker’s life who endure silently and “never walk away” from a marriage or a home, even as they face battering: “They hold up sky and swelling tidal drives.”
While these poems are personal, they also elevate themselves to a political level. As the poet writes, “Confessional poetry is often a term of belittlement. / Leveraging the grammatical illusion of a self” as a trick. It’s always a pleasant surprise when a poem can exist inside a collection but also speak to the craft of poetry writing itself. In “Confession,” we glimpse a bit of philosophy standing behind the poet, who wears “only language.” This is an important contrast to the clothing referenced throughout the collection such as a “carceral gown” or a “dress paper thin / betting on men seeing her skin.” Language, the very act of speaking truth, is denied this speaker. From the silencing that occurs within the family and the silencing that comes from the state, we witness a fate that many women have faced throughout history as part of a patriarchal system.
In “The Structure of Time in a Burning House,” we watch a metaphorical fire consume the home even as, “the mother keeps saying there’s no danger.” Behind the house “a generations-old oak / shimmers like a candelabrum” and inside, “as the family eats at the oak table, / it’s she alone who sees the fire / and she will never be allowed to speak of it.” Family secrets flicker and burn and yet even as we see the danger approach, dysfunctional family roles are maintained, each contributing to the all-consuming fire.
In the title poem, “Magicicada,” the reader is haunted by the speaker’s plight as she appeals to get herself out of the state asylum. The teenage speaker has spent time in solitary confinement for her socially unacceptable reaction to her father’s inappropriate touching:
Every thirteen years, she returns—
mind, soul, wings
opening, the terrible bruising
where the Charlottesville police have handled her
legs, head, wings
opening, she calls you, entering
the vast circulation of data, Come get me!
Like the cicada that spends most of its life in silence, our speaker is “inaudible for years, then surface[s]… carried on golden wings beyond asylum.” It is a reminder that minors in our society must often rely on the same adults who cause them harm in order to return home.
In “Wedding Garment,” the speaker acknowledges that as girls, “our bodies, when we were young, were given / to those to whom we never said Yes.” This lack of consent and treatment of the speaker and her female kin as objectified women threads throughout the poems in a world that’s about maintaining an outward appearance via “pretty dresses.” “She taught me / to wear pretty dresses like that. / When you feel bad, look good.”
Many of the poems in this collection exist in that liminal state of in-between, the space trauma survivors occupy where “you can’t tell the difference / between sky and ocean. Horizon vanishes / and you’re alone with your memory of it.” The transitional state is the hard part of remembering the truth, acknowledging what happened, and processing it in order to rebuild and heal. Magicicada captures this internal, often elusive process in a vulnerable and sensitive manner that many readers will relate to. Millikin demonstrates a profound respect for trauma and the growth that can take place when a survivor realizes their strength and claims their voice. At one point, the speaker recognizes, “I am a broken thing and dangerous because of it.” In “Nietzsche’s Horse,” the speaker reflects:
Sometimes I turn back, in mind,
to my survival strategy in solitary
of stepping up
and down on the small fixed chair,
up and down, over and over, for hours
until I grew so strong
I became a horse, and have run
long distance ever since I got out.
Even as readers share in witnessing this trauma, we also watch the speaker navigate and grow from it. In a world that is dangerous to female bodies, it may take a woman years to find her voice. The brilliance of Magicicada is that it gives readers permission to use those voices when they do arrive, no matter how long it takes. Millikin reminds us we can rebuild from ruins and learn to cope so we can “sing / without a congregation.”
POETRY Magicicada
By Claire Millikin
Unicorn Press
Published May 23, 2024
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