Let my father be a man who loved me poorly which means he loved me. Some stories we tell ourselves when we need to sleep and some we tell when we need to stay awake. Both of them may be true. This is the duplicity. But did he love me? This is what I am attempting to discover. I used to tell myself I had a happy childhood because I survived it. Until I was outside the story, I couldn’t tell it differently.
But how is this related at all to art? It isn’t and it is. How one travels—
No, how I traveled across the years from character to become the Maker of my story, so let me begin: My father was an artist whose addiction painted across the surface of all our lives thirty years later I am still finding his paint in the seams.
We all have our ways of saying disrepair hopeless case. My father said he wasn’t hurting anyone but himself. This gave me years of material to drink about. Audre Lorde says, the erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. Have I felt erotic about my father? About the long tongue of whiskey pushing down my throat until I didn’t care? Once, my father attempted to apologize, said,
I am sorry
you feel that way, but I don’t control your feelings. The audience, when I read this keeps asking if my work is autobiography.
It is. I just don’t know who I am writing about. Each incident I reveal becomes facsimile when retold, a thousand perfect silkscreen prints with small variations. Does this make me the artist or only an assistant in the studio endlessly reproducing the same grief with minor discrepancies.
Audre Lorde again, within the celebration of the erotic my work becomes a conscious decision, so I decide to keep writing. Sometimes a thing is not true because it happened, but true because I made it. I decide to write the next poem convinced I will never discover the answers about art, or family, or anything. But I do believe in the power of making and in witness to that making, so maybe you are the artist, the one who makes the making possible, that you are the one completing this. Don’t you already know it— how the page has loved you the whole time?
Jory Mickelson’s first book, Wilderness//Kingdom, was winner of a 2020 High Plains Book Award. Their second book All This Divide (Spuyten Duyvil Press) and third book, Picturing (End of the Line Press), are forthcoming in 2024. Other publications include Court Green, Poetry Northwest, DIAGRAM, Jubilat, Terrain.org, and The Rumpus. They are the recipient fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, The Desert Rat Writers Residency, Dear Butte, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. They live and write in the Pacific Northwest. To learn more about their work, visit www.jorymickelson.com.
