‘Gaslight’
— Nix Thérèse
How do you account for the truth when you’re not sure if you fully recognize it? ‘Gaslight’ offers the option of laying out all the “truths” you know and funneling through them until you find some consensus. When the speaker says, “there was no art to the refusal of unpacking,” it felt weighed: in this context, the unpacking of all this trauma only makes them question their memories more. They’re constantly prodding and re-investigating: no; maybe I didn’t; yes, that’s true; didn’t I? This winding mental landscape is mirrored in the poem itself that flips through and turns over scenes of everyday violence—chickens dying off at the hands of the butcher, the cats risking their bodies under the chain link fence, the baby rats huddled & fighting against each other in the wall. The speaker has an acute awareness of the danger of this landscape across multiple bodies—their own, those being snuffed out by butchers, unfortunate creatures who must scrape by. Whether or not the gaslighting allows them to fully process their position in this conflict, their mental notes of the cacophony surrounding them only make the relative silence of the conflict between speaker and partner magnified: him growling in their ear instead of raising his voice, his body overtaking theirs so completely that all they use the kleaver outside as a way of marking time against their likely erratic breath.
There’s a real proficiency to the layout: all orbit of this interpersonal conflict only further clarify and add emotional weight to the center. Throughout their processing, it’s less important to me that every moment be 100% factually honest when each feels carefully and meticulously placed. Here, it’s most crucial to build empathy for the speaker by seeing what they see, and fracturing where they fracture. The unpacked books felt so heartbreaking because reading not only provides escape, but also a way to become intimate with yourself. But the speaker here has limited access to this self-processing. They’d have to contort their body to even reach the contents and given the overbearing nature of their partner, I don’t imagine they’d have much time to kick back and find themself in a different universe. They only seem to locate themself next to / in the viscerally wounded, scraping, or dying. It’s in this stripping of possibility that we consider just how much gaslighting robs you of any other focus.
[Correction: in an earlier version of this blurb, I used the term “mastery”, which I’ve come to realize is a loaded and problematic way to discuss someone’s work. There should be no conflation of possessor of enslaved people and someone with learned skills in their creative field. We shouldn’t erase or underplay the anti-black violences that have been enacted globally, but rather continue to hone our language.]