After Houses: Poetry for the Homeless

By Claire Millikin

AFTER HOUSES is an extended meditation on homelessness. In unflinching, raw poetry, poet Claire Millikin explores states of homelessness, and a longing for, even a devotion to, houses—houses as spaces where one could be safe and at ease. The poems move through an American landscape, between the South and the North, between childhood and adulthood, reaching toward a home that’s never reached, drawing from personal and family history, from classical mythology and architectural theory, to shape a poetry of empathy. AFTER HOUSES echo the voices of girls who have not quite survived, but who persist, intact in the way that Rimbaud insists on intactness, in words. With an Introduction by Tara Betts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: 2Leaf Press
• Release date: May 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940939315

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AFTER HOUSES . . .

Claire Millikin writes with deep feeling, craft, and delicacy about trauma; she makes obsessive, careful music — in the manner of Joseph Cornell’s sublime work — from her repeated divinations of foreclosed and melancholy vistas. An astute critic as well as a scrupulous and admirably driven poet, she combines formal élan and emotional intensity. I think of her poems as following in the noble, painful tradition of Maurice Blanchot — language reaching toward silence.

— Wayne Koestenbaum, Distinguished Professor of English at the

City University of New York Graduate Center, author of Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background (2012)

"As Claire Millikin puts it in the final poem of her After Houses, Poetry for the Homeless, 'This is a book of escape & survival.' Memory here does more than talk, it sings through eloquently detailed poems about exile from a beloved house, about 'crossing thresholds' in cars with a baby, about growing older. Although all of us readers' lives differ, this book can also be shared as 'our history. Don’t turn away.'"

— Henry Braun, poet and peace activist

author of Loyalty, New and Selected Poems (2006)

"Claire Millikin’s deeply perceptive and elegiac poems remind us that the words we use to define the world are the same words that define our losses. Acknowledging the perilous journey of human survival, these poems teach us that 'the four walls of/ a house may vanish if/ we do not define it.' Both lush with language and haunting, After Houses is a work of uncanny beauty."

— Kathleen Ellis, author of Vanishing Act (2007)

The house, Gaston Bachelard tells us, 'is our corner of the world . . . our first universe, a cosmos in every sense of the word.' Millikin’s hibernal, transient, gypsy economy of pawn and rent offers a hagiography not of sanctuary but of abandonment, vanishing, nightmare, salvage, banishment, and betrayal. In the triptych altars of dressing rooms, train station bathrooms, cinderblock restaurants, libraries, closets, cars, and the carapace of second-hand coats, the narrators of these haunted poems articulate an implacable, restive heimweh. 'This history of tarnish and salvage wires my soul,' says one speaker. That one never feels quite safe in these poems is testament to their post-Lapsarian truth and power.

— Lisa Russ Spear, author of Vanitas, Rough: Poems and

The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry

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AFTER HOUSES, POETRY FOR THE HOMELESS BY CLAIRE MILLIKIN, Copyright © 2014 by 2Leaf Press. (www.claireraymond.org). All rights reserved under international and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of this author's rights is appreciated. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in or introduced in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of both the copyright owner and 2LEAF PRESS, an imprint of the Intercultural Alliance of Artists & Scholars, Inc. (IAAS), the publisher of this book, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles.

Library of Congress Control Number:  2014930044

Print Edition, ISBN-13: 978-1-940939-30-8

ePub Edition, 978-1-940939-31-5

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Published in the United States of America

First Edition | First Printing

Disclaimer:

Note to the Reader

Viewing this eBook at a higher than optimal text size will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably. Since eBooks are formatted as reflowable text and have to work on many different screens and devices, it is impossible to guarantee that the poems will display as the poet intended. As such, some of the lines will display as multiple lines of text. When this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a slight indent, prompting the reader that this is a continuation of a previous line. In order to read the poetry as it was written, we suggest that you read this book at the default font size on your device. Please note, that spacing of some of the poems were either truncated or eliminated to accommodate reflowable text format. Please refer to the print edition of this book for a more accurate rendering of the poetry.

Poetry for the Homeless

by Claire Millikin

Introduction by Tara Betts

Credits

Cover photo: Gary Baller, Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission, Copyright © 2007

Author Photo: Elisabeth Hogeman

Book design and layout: Gabrielle David, www.gabrielle-david.com

for Donna Boguslav

Moi, je suis intact, et ca m’est égal

— Arthur Rimbaud

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Disclaimer: Note to the Reader

Credits

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

BROKEN DOORS

The Ruins

On Wearing Pawned Rings

Clothing Store in the Town of Impossible Rebirth

In Dressing Rooms

In That City By Water

Clothes of Snow

After Houses

Library Cuirass

Eschatology Apartment

Dusk Boxes, Interiors

Shadow Portrait

Hölderlin’s Birds

When We Could Not Be Innocent

The Falconer

Librarian of Salt

Library for Tobacco

Cigarettes and the Infant

The Lambs

The Snow Architect

Dusk Waitress

Of Girls

Train Station Bathroom at Night

Train Station Bathroom Architecture

Survival Sex

Anorexia Café

The Disappearance

Hand in Glove

Parking Lots of the Nineteen-Seventies

Doors and Ghosts

Knob and Tube

Eastern Seaboard Greyhound Incantation

Toil of Birds

Stray

Insects

Dunes

Solitary Confinement

Swimming Pools of Western Georgia

Coming Home in Another Country

The Sacrifice

The Track’s Late Mirrors

Vodka and Rice

Duplicity

Virgin, Meditations

Dining Hall Workers, Yale University, circa 1990

Poppies

Sweet Tooth

House in Closet

Translator

Red Paint Fence

Winter’s Keys

Moving Out

Insomnia’s Plow

Skirting Homelessness

Car of Sky, Car of Earth

The Terror of Objects

Before Seat Belts

Dairy Queen Redux

The Gardeners

Salt

The Next Day

Filling Stations

TRANSIENT SHELTERS

Snow Rooms

The Rain Motel

Coins

The Grift Apartment

Returning from the Outer Banks, 1979

Pure Substance

The Animals of Rain

Marine

Autumn Taxi

Jelly Fish

Fireflies

Hunters

Outer Banks

Helen Mouyou

Moon-Bathing

Icarus, Girl

The