Marnie Ritchie: Anxious Attachment
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
Anxious attachment[1]
I want the “a,” the one, unto itself all it self, same, auto
-toxic, -erotic, -deictic,
Me me and me, us three a-nough.
I want this “a” and not any of those “a’s”
And these aaaaaaaaah’s different from the ah ah ah’s
As it goes in this hole, a hole, this one ahh
Somewhere, an abalone sweats inside itself
And steams itself alive, screaming.
Does it come on a report card?
Can I have it?
I want the “a” that in love I “ain’t got no more”
And were abandoned-by
To get this self and that self and an-other
And a-verything un-affixed in an indefinite
article.
...
A-verything I learned about deconstruction
and a desire that is not my own
began with an “a,”
the professor’s “a” and all her other little “a’s”
assembled around the first “a”
the way ants spread out to find treasure.
aha aha aha, ants must say
before they form a pheromone-informed line.
I want the ants, unto themselves, all them-selves, same, auto-
feeling, antennae-aligned.
Or maybe it began
before that, the “a” in the classroom,
the shape of a closed fist,
the feeling of my mother’s fingers tracing not-quite-q’s
around my belly button, this one here
...
The self is a “line of approach” from “some angle,”
which is an-other’s way of saying “analyst,”
an-other’s way of placing a tongue
on the back of teeth ana-lyssst ang-le l-ine
The analyst wants assurance and some quiet and
for bad people to actually die.
We, us three, have read her desire,
the “a” in each message unsunk
from a bottle.
Tell me tell me
Have I “merged” my desire “back into
this irreducible a sufficiently,”
this un-abstractable a?
Tell me
...
I want the autos.
This much is clear.
n’a plus, n’a plus, n’a plus,
I say to the tenderest parts of my-self,
as a woman somewhere chokes on mountain air
and a man on the same mountain laughs ahaha
Each arrow traces an “I” aloft,
back back ack stuck in a double loop,
which, hey, looks sort of like an “a”
drawn by a dog in the snow (again! again!).
I want the “a” that in love comes drifting,
as if undersea, from the mouth of an-other,
an-other, and an-other, too,
writing with the -ains, body’s salt, a-verything in between.
Which one of the “a’s” do I want in the word “attachment” itself?
I’d take either, or another.
[1] All quotations are from Jacques Lacan’s Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by A. R. Price (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014).
Marnie Ritchie is a writer and Assistant Professor of rhetoric. Her poetry has appeared in FIVE:2:ONE’s #thesideshow, Juked Magazine, and Burning House Press. She earned a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Texas at Austin. She currently lives in Tacoma, WA with her cat. You can find her on Twitter @marnieritchie.
