What Do We Do When the Old Monsters Die by Chelsea Rathburn

I had a poem published last week in X. P. Callahan’s Diary Poems, which is kind of unusual for me these days. It’s challenging to publish when you don’t submit much (or at all) so I very much appreciate X. P. asking me to send some things and that one of the pieces landed. 

It’s a poem about a challenging subject, in case you’re thinking about clicking on that link. The title is “To Karen, Who Molested Me,” and while in most cases it’s a good idea to keep some distance as a reader between the I of the poem and the person of the poet, that’s not necessary in this case. The Me in the title is me, and Karen is indeed the name of the babysitter who, when I was 4-5, molested me in our little red and white trailer in Angleton, Texas, the one in the trailer park that had a tree I could climb a little and shells for the road and for a while an empty lot beside it that I played in with my sister. 

I’ve written about this for years, about the experience and the memory and the questions that come up when you discover that things you know you remember couldn’t have possibly happened when they did—for example, I have a strong connection in my head between being molested and the song “Love Will Keep Us Together” by The Captain and Tennille even though the song came out well at least a year after it ended—and how that can make you question everything else.

And of course I’ve talked about this with my therapist for many years now as well, about how triggers work and how to learn to cope with them. I don’t have a panic attack when I hear that song anymore and I have accepted that memory can be imperfect and still true on important matters. Some of that is in the poem, which is a modification of a form I’ve always loved writing in.

The sestina, if you’re not steeped in this kind of lore, is a form from the French that uses repeated end words in a particular pattern to form a rhetorical circle of sorts. The stanzas are six lines long which means there are only six end words for the entirety of the poem, which is 39 lines long. If you were to keep the poem going in the same pattern after the first six stanzas, the seventh would see the end words back where they began, and some sestinas will have those end words appear in that order in the 3-line envoi that ends the form. The effect traditionally is that the poem deals with memory and reminiscence. The repetitiveness of the end words along with the length of the poem pushes both the reader and the poet in that direction.

But I didn’t want this poem to end up where it started. Or maybe it’s that I wanted to push back on memory and this experience, so I messed with the form. 

In the traditional sestina, the end word of the last line of a stanza repeats immediately as the end word of the first line of the next stanza, so I decided to try swapping out that end word with an antonym, and then keeping it in there for the rest of the poem. By the time I got to the envoi, all the end words had been exchanged for some version of their opposite. The poem starts as a letter to my abuser remembering those moments and ends with the time when I started to tell other people that it had happened. There’s movement from victim toward agency, even though it’s the first halting steps in that direction. Other readers are in a better place to say how well I did it or if the form works at all, but that’s where I was coming from in the poem.

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It’s a happy coincidence that this happened right when I started reading Chelsea Rathburn’s new book just out from LSU Press, Broken Houses. (If this sort of thing matters to you, I’ve known Chelsea since our MFA days in the early 21st century at the University of Arkansas.) I think it’s a terrific book overall, and part of that comes from knowing the places she writes about—she’s from south Florida, as is my wife and her family—and that recognition of places and experiences does a lot for me as a reader. 

But the poem I want to hone in on is titled “What Do We Do When the Old Monsters Die” and the title also serves as the first line of the poem. Here’s the question as a whole.

What Do We Do When the Old Monsters Die

not the ghouls we dreamed under our beds
but the ones who crept in, nails sharp as rakes,
the real ones who swayed over their forks and plates
or lodged inside our heads?  

And what struck me the moment I read this was how “over their forks and plates” makes this immediate and personal. I want to be clear, I don’t have any reason to believe that Rathburn here is talking about child sexual abuse—that’s the lens I bring to this for obvious reasons—but it reinforces the reality that when it comes to child abuse in general, it’s way more likely to come from a family member or friend than from a stranger, someone who would have been a guest at dinner more than once perhaps.

The next line is heartbreaking. “So many nights / we kept on the lights and tried to make ourselves / small.” That desire to hide, that hope that if you are just quiet enough then nothing bad will happen.

The poem doesn’t leave us in that moment, though. The poem’s title asks “what do we do when the old monsters die” but the rest of the poem asks “what about before they die but after we’re beyond their reach?” The poem supposes a monster who is facing death and is trying to get right with god. Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

what do we do when our wishes come true
and their poor hearts or lungs or livers fail
and they say they've found Jesus and cry out 
Forgive us Forgive us Forgive us (we're told)
but we still won't answer our phones or open
their mail? (Is it true we're cruel and cold?)

I really like the choice of “us” versus “me” in that line because it seems like it’s never just one. It would be nice for it to be just one, I think. But the real power is in the plea from the monster begging forgiveness and apparently claiming the speaker is cruel and cold for not being willing to engage. 

This isn’t a scenario I’ll ever get to deal with. Fortunately, my abuse ended not terribly long after it started. One of my aunts moved in with us for a while and took over the child care duties, and then we moved to Louisiana, far away from Karen. I don’t know if she’s still alive or if she ever thought twice about that time. It’s taken a lot of work for me but I don’t even try to imagine it anymore. I’ve accepted that it’s unknowable. But I can say that in some alternate universe where Karen shows up 50+ years later and demands forgiveness out of the blue that it’s not cruel to deny that. Even when a person who has harmed you has done real work to atone and change, you don’t owe them forgiveness. 

But that’s rarely how it happens, isn’t it?

The second section of Rathburn’s poem restates the opening question but moves it back in time from “when the old monsters die” to “when the monsters grow thin / their eyes sunken in, and we cannot stand to join the rest, to pat the jaundiced hands?” and also starts to poke at the social pressure that we can get from, for instance, extended family or members of a community, to let grievances go when it’s clear that the monster is about to die or at least has lost some of the ability they once had to cause direct harm. The next lines talk of the monster being “stripped / of their claws and fangs and look, in the end / like ordinary old women and men” and I think that impulse is understandable, especially for someone who maybe wasn’t the direct recipient of harm, who only heard stories or suspected but never really knew. 

And if you’re the person being pressured, subtly or overtly, to forgive, that can hurt a lot, as though your experiences weren’t as bad as you thought they were or worse, that you are in fact the monster because, as someone at the service says “They were so kind / to me, they were always, always so kind.” But as anyone with experience with abusers will tell you, abusers aren’t terrible to everyone. They cultivate non-abusive relationships as a way to have a buffer when or if their victims ever speak up.

That this part of the poem happens at a funeral is also important, because 1) that’s when emotions are running high and 2) it’s taboo to speak ill of the person in the box (or urn as the case may be). The cultural requirement that we not disrespect the feelings of the mourners is strong, no matter how much harm they did in their lives, and it can leave the victim feeling not only alone, but betrayed to see people who know the harm they did either minimizing it or denying it outright in that moment. 

I’ve received permission from Chelsea to run the poem in its entirety here, as it hasn’t been published elsewhere except for in her new book, which you should definitely read.

What Do We Do When the Old Monsters Die

not the ghouls we dreamed under our beds
but the ones who crept in, nails sharp as rakes,
the real ones who swayed over their forks and plates
or lodged inside our heads? So many nights
we kept on the lights and tried other make ourselves
small. So many times we wished them dead. Now
what do we do when our wishes come true
and their poor hearts or lungs or livers fail
and they say they've found Jesus and cry out
Forgive us Forgive us Forgive us (we're told)
but we still won't answer our phones or open
their mail? (Is it true we're cruel and cold?)

What do we do when the monsters grow thin,
their eyes sunken in, and we cannot stand
to join the rest, to pat the jaundiced hands?
What will we have left when they are stripped
of their claws and fangs, and look, in the end,
like ordinary old women or men?
At the service, someone will cry, They were so kind
to me, they were always, always so kind—
We'd roll our eyes. It's best we don't attend.

I could say a lot more about this poem, about the form and how it creates this tension between such a personal, visceral subject and the formal stiffness that emanates from the rhymes and the iambic pentameter. About how there are only three non-questions in the whole thing and they’re all short and direct compared to these winding, complex questions that make up the bulk of the poem. But if I did that, there’d be so much less for everyone else to talk about.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this poem in the comments. Thanks as always for sticking with me this long.