The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: A Registry of Survival by Ann Tweedy

Happy New Year! This selection, chosen by guest editor Valyntina Grenier, is from A Registry of Survival by Ann Tweedy, released by Last Word Press in 2020.

Primal Scream

When I was five or so, my mother saw the Primal Scream as a way to cope. She talked about getting a person-sized wooden box to go inside and scream in. In my imagination now, the box looks like a coffin, but maybe it was more like a small closet. Since we never had much money, she just went up into the half-finished attic and screamed, sans box. The police will come, my father said, and I felt a mix of apprehension and interest. What would it be like to be questioned by police, to try to explain that there was no emergency? Would they believe us? I didn’t worry about the ripple effects of neighbors seeing the police, though I’m sure my father did. But I was curious—was he right, would they come? But they never did. Or at least not then.

Now I’m learning more—that John and Yoko both tried and liked Primal Therapy in the early ‘70s. Steve Jobs took a brief gander as well. The therapist and author–one Janov–has since been largely discredited. The therapy went on longer than he posited and didn’t suck the childhood trauma out of most patients, as promised.

You could say a lot about my mother in those days. She was susceptible to expert crackpots–no doubt. The trauma she noticed was usually inside her. Her only child, I was either indistinguishable from her or aligned with evil forces. But now she won’t take medications for fear of deadly side effects and she can’t trust a psychiatrist for more than a few weeks. After that, they start selling her confidences or plotting to kill her. I look back and think of her then–a person with hope.

Ann Tweedy‘s first full-length book, The Body’s Alphabet, was published by Headmistress Press in 2016. It earned a Bisexual Book Award in Poetry and was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and for a Golden Crown Literary Society Award. Ann also has published three chapbooks, Beleaguered Oases (2nd ed. Seven Kitchens 2020), White Out (Green Fuse Poetic Arts 2013), and A Registry of Survival (Last Word 2020). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Literary Mama, Clackamas Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, and many other places, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and three Best of the Net Awards. A law professor by day, Ann has devoted her career to serving Native Tribes. She currently teaches at University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law.

Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of Honeymoon Shoes and the chapbooks, Fever Dream/ Take Heart and In Our Now. You’ll find her work in, Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, Lana Turner, The Journal, Querencia, and The Wardrobe. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.