Don’t Ask Why Book Club: Dolores

Editor’s note: This post contains references to assault and domestic violence.

Growing up I had a particular fondness for a family friend. She was one of those ageless women, one who—I would not understand until I reached the age my parents had been when we knew her—was considerably older than my parents but spry. Energetic and fun in a way that people her age did not always turn out to be. She lived nearby and I could find myself at her house on occasion making up some chore she did not necessarily need done, just so I could nab some cookies and lemonade. Her name was Dolores. It might have been spelled Deloris. But by the time I knew the difference, it was too late to matter.

As I learned to speak Spanish, I discovered that dolores was the plural of dolor: pain. How could it be that my whimsical, delightful elder friend was named for pain? And the pain-upon-pain of the plural form at that. I found the dissonance of this naming to be a particular kind of cruelty, though I doubt Dolores—or Deloris—saw it that way at all.

It doesn’t work exactly the same way in French, as best as I can tell. But both languages, Romantic as they are, share the same Latin roots where dolor still puts a word on pain, singular or plural.

Michelle Ortega writes of another Dolores, a faceless woman whose story she encountered on a tour boat along the Seine in Paris, a woman memorialized by a series of handmade posters, one for each painful letter in her name, a woman who represented the thirty-third murder (thirty-third of the year? of the month? of time immemorial?). In her poem, “Thirty-Third Murder,” Michelle shares a snippet of her personal dolores as she sails past the posters:

[…] I don’t snap a shot, although I have
a cloud full of street art from all the places we’ve strolled, as if the
memorial would have been defiled by curiosity, and then I wonder how
much more defiled Dolores can be, and remember how the jeweler
wouldn’t price my engagement ring when I tried to sell it (he didn’t
want to insult me) and I told him there couldn’t be anything worse
than what I already suffered (he gave me two hundred for it); I won-
der, can I say strangled if I have survived, if someday I can stop speak-
ing about what happened, or should I never stop because DOLORES
40 ANS, 33ième, morte, can’t ever speak again, all the while the sun—
the sun—pinks my face gently.

We asked Michelle about the source of some of the dolores in this collection. Responses have been edited for length and clarity…

Tweetspeak: The poems in this collection tell a tender and difficult story in a subtle way. Would you be willing to share more of “the basic facts” of the story—so your readers can understand the context? We believe this will help them see the true genius of the poems more clearly.

Michelle Ortega: The basic facts: I had a brief second marriage and 2X, as I refer to him, most likely had borderline personality disorder, and many hidden ways of self-medicating that he didn’t have access to after we were married. Four months in, I came home to find him in an alcohol-induced blackout state and he assaulted me by choking. He was a physically strong man, and in a primal rage, and I couldn’t free myself. He finally thrust me away and I was able to flee the house with my daughter, who was then 12 years old.

The assault was the catalyst for a long healing journey that continues to this day. It was a singular incident that reframed a long history of abuse (emotional and sexual) that I had to unpack; I had no trust in my own judgement any more because I missed so many “signs,” not realizing that my own frame of reference, my “normal,” was not “functional.” I literally lost my physical voice after the assault, but I had lost my emotional voice long before it as well. Writing was, and continues to be, a primary tool in my recovery.

2X is not the only “he” in this collection; “he” sometimes represents a collective loss of relationships, and beautiful fragments that persist in the pain of moving forward. Or other “he’s” that became part of driving my healing forward.

________

…the sun—the sun—pinks my face gently.

As with so many of Michelle’s poems, the last line turns time upside down. I can’t know whether the pinking comes from recollected trauma, from anger, or, as I read it, from a newness, a freshness. The sun gives life, pink on the skin, in such contrast to Dolores’s faded posters on cold, worn stone.

That line evokes the same response in me as does the one-word sentence at the end of “She Wants.” Daybreak. Newness. Life. Pink.

[…] She wants the essential to remain: an empty matchbox, a blue marble,
the memory of her child who is now a woman. Morning asana with her
head bowed low, or arms outstretched in tree pose. Daybreak.

TS: Do you remember which poem in this collection was written first? How did it come to be?

MO: The first poem written in this collection…isn’t included in this collection! A month after my father passed away from ALS, I attended a local workshop on haiku and haibun, where I began to write with a new freedom. I connected well with the workshop leader and worked with her privately while developing this collection. While I often write in haibun, which is a form that combines prose poetry and haiku, the collection seemed more fluid with only the prose poems. I have a handful of these poems about my dad’s illness that may end up as part of something else in the future, but for now they remain as a “silent partner” behind Don’t Ask Why.

“Show Me” was probably the first of these, written in proximity to “Let the Questions Go Unanswered” and “She Wants.” Each of these poems represents a shift toward acceptance and making room for the new, especially within the context of my relationship with my daughter as she grew up.

_______

The poems in this collection are rich. Difficult. But rich with images that place a reader in their own Parisian tour boat through time, peeking behind their own posters that memorialize their dolores, looking up to let the sun pink their own cool skin.

In October, we invite you to join us for a patron-only book club discussion of Michelle Ortega’s collection. We will talk about the poems and themes of the collection, as well as share excerpts from an interview with Michelle.

Don’t Ask Why is a limited-edition chapbook. To obtain one of the last print copies (or a pdf version once copies are gone), please email Michelle about payment and shipping options at michellebelleparis AT gmail DOT com.

We’ll be reading on the schedule below:

Week 1: October 20: Dolores
Week 2: October 27
Week 3: November 3

Featured photo by Bradley Weber, Creative Commons license via Flickr. In-post photo by L.L. Barkat. Post by Will Willingham.

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Will Willingham

Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.

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