Melissa Eleftherion on Her Poems
Content warning: trauma, sexual violence, incest, and rape
If you came of age in the late 80s, someone may have sat you down in front of a tv showing Poltergeist (age 8), or slipped you a copy of Flowers in the Attic too young (age 10). Or, if you were fortunate enough to have a teenage babysitter who became so terrified during a viewing of Halloween that she woke you up (age 9) to watch it with her, you too may have developed a predilection for the horror genre.
Some of the erasure poems featured here work with V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in The Attic as a source text, a book I (oddly) read and reread as a youth. The book was a beloved (yet deeply problematic) novel passed from friend to friend in hushed voices. Its premise unfolds the incestuous Dollanganger family saga, with the central story revolving around an uncle and niece who marry & have four children. When the uncle (father) suddenly dies in a car accident, the mother is left bankrupt & returns to her wealthy parent’s estate to get back in their good graces. The caveat is that she must conceal evidence of her past marriage (her children) from the patriarch in order to earn back his trust & her inheritance.
As a middle schooler who often felt monstrous on the inside, I strongly identified with most first-person outsider protagonists, and the Dollanganger children were easily-identifiable outcasts to me back then, relegated as they were to their estranged grandparents’ locked attic, where they were forced to find ways to educate & entertain themselves for years on end, subsisting on kitchen scraps and poisoned donuts. At the same time, Flowers in the Attic was probably the first book I read that normalized emotional labor for rape victims toward their rapists.
It can be a troubled & layered relationship, this one of readers & their books that both frighten & enlighten. At times, I have found comfort reading novels that helped me externalize my own traumatic experiences with sexual violence, and YA novels can be singularly cathartic for teens and adults. Flowers in the Attic, however, is not a book I’d generally recommend for those seeking healing, given its graphic scenes of rape, incest, and child abuse. Though, in the recesses of my deeply troubled existence as a book-obsessed & socially awkward neurodiverse tween, it provided some solace, and helped to validate my suspicions about those family members my gut told me to mistrust. So - all in all, reading this book at a young age helped shape my identity & loaned to me moments of resolute strength.
These erasure poems are from a series I’ve been working on about trauma. Erasures can be a useful form for processing trauma because it can help the writer externalize events that come up, while also building towards a catharsis. They can help one extirpate & shine a light on the dark. Erasures can also be less labor-intensive because the author is not singularly responsible for the poem that’s created. It is a collaboration between the author and the existing text. The creation of an erasure poem can happen organically, through a series of associations and connections that develop between the author and the page.
With a single page from Flowers in the Attic as a backdrop or landscape for each of these erasure poems, I was able to construct very sparing poems that accrete towards a narrative. Since I had a previous relationship with the text, I was able to tap back into the young person reading and connecting with that book, and also move beyond those memories to build towards something new. Found poems can have the uncanny ability to strike at the core of the unconscious tenor of what’s happening, whether in the world, the mind, or the body. I like experimenting with the treasures resonant in someone else’s language. These experiments also give agency to the author to reshape or reclaim the narrative to tell a story that is hidden beneath the surface, again revealing what must be revealed.