levelheaded: dear anne with the broken fingernails

 

In the first stanza of Sara Peck’s “dear anne with the broken fingernails,” the speaker addresses a disconnect between the body and the self. With “broken fingernails” and a “police report,” Peck establishes a dark scene, one in which the body either acts in contrast to the mind, or has actions done to it against its will. It’s as if someone other than the body has “dressed [the body] casually for [the] occasion.” Someone else “moved [the body] to California” or brought it “to a party.”

 

Perhaps this “self betrayal” is the reason people “feel most at ease / in the smallness of moving through houses built / of crannies and belows the stairs.” Confined spaces allow for less opportunity to stray too far from ourselves. “[W]ilderness [might] feel so tight,” because of the anxiety one feels knowing that, in an open expanse, the possibility for body and mind separation heightens. There’s “too much to fill” in these instances—too much emptiness, too many opportunities for our physical form to break away from our conscience.

 

When we unspool in these moments, we must “respool [our] threaded arms til / they resemble arms again.” The arms that “don’t trust the girls / because why would they” lead to suicidal actions. The speaker reflects on Lauren taping weights to her legs and plunging into the water in a moment that might be “too far to come back” from.

 

In the speaker’s final, surprising assertion, the idea that the speaker has a heart with “too much to fill” is reiterated. When Peck writes, “I never wanted to be a vessel,” we can feel an emptiness filling like a body might fill with water, in direct contrast to what the mind has always wanted.

 

 

– The Editors