Permit Me to Write My Own Ending by Rebecca Faulkner

Permit Me to Write My Own Ending, Rebecca Faulkner’s harrowing collection of poems, exists almost outside of time. It is not a narrative trajectory of a single speaker, yet the I dominates the landscape of her work, a litany of first-person perspectives so that each poem could be spoken by any girl, woman, or mother at any time. Though some are clearly from the viewpoint of those living through previous moments in history (Sophie Scholl, the Dora Case Study, the bombardments of WWII), the effect is the raw vulnerability of confession across a broad landscape, voices that reveal the tenderness and vulnerability and violence that so many women experience.

I really loved how off-kilter this book left me. Faulkner starts with poems about childhood and weaves in poems about motherhood, but there are also poems about war, miscarriages, addiction, love, and betrayal. Their order is less chronological or narrative than it is about juxtaposition, often with love and loss or tenderness and violence existing close together. In “Trafalgar Square,” romance and bloodshed smash headlong into each other: my first mistake was kissing you / at the riot/blood on stone steps / stained purple from headwounds / my lipstick smeared. This is the heady, addling sort of mix Faulkner brings to many of her poems: lurid and shocking but also beautiful and passionate.

Throughout the collection, caesuras are used to great effect, the white space creating gaps where emotions have become too overwhelming to be processed as language. In “Operation Virginity,” the lines become fragmented as a young soldier endures sexual violence:

I don’t want to bleed on my first deployment
wearing my innocence like his dog tags

close my eyes as the bathroom spins     tight grip
on my arm      hauling me up                 the size of him

at the sink      wet hands on his fatigues
I try not to speak       remember to follow orders

The more out-of-control the speaker feels, the more the gaps appear, efficiently creating stress and trauma in a poem that is almost entirely devoid of the actual act that is occurring. Faulkner uses this device throughout the collection, although she has a deft touch, and the caesuras are used to create myriad responses in the reader. In “Small Bodies of Water,” caesuras are used to invoke rhythm, the calm feeling of water lapping and soothing a woman who has just experienced a miscarriage:

            stood on the shore           held the undertow
            in the crook of my arm                 rocked it gently
            felt the water latch          cleaned the algae
            from her slick black hair.

Faulkner has a way of leaving and filling space to create rhythm, and she does so by also being selective with her word choice: the water latches like an infant, she is both rocked by and rocking the water, the gaps between each moment are filled with the emptiness that is the loss of her daughter.

The title of the collection was my favorite device, starting the reader in a place of hopelessness and slowly transforming into something with more agency and force. The first poem, “I know the sea is deep,” is about a boy leaping from a cliff to his death: I know you removed your shoes, / that your blond hair flew like a slap. A bleak way to write one’s own ending, to be sure, and a helpless one—a childhood trauma that feels completely lacking in control. Even the titular poem is one of limited options as a woman decides to leave her adulterous partner: Ink on your fingers / & girls in your crosshairs, I taste abandon in the bite / of your cologne. Ill-used and angry, she writes her own ending in leaving and burning it all behind her, but the feeling is grim: I have closed / myself before, a kitchen in midwinter.

I know you removed your shoes, that your blond hair flew like a slap.

While the title can allude to hopelessness and characters tossed around by violence and the cruelty of fate, the last poem beautifully undercuts it all with a delightfully grisly story of revenge and catharsis. In “Last Rites,” the speaker plans to kill and bury her abuser in the back yard, a man-size plot in the groin / of the garden. She imagines throwing into the grave all the evidence of violence against her, from the broken glass of beer bottles he threw to the scrawled notes and stale prayers, / the cold shoulder from the neighbors who looked the other way. This imagined murder is a catalyst, though, an exit for the unnamed speaker to take back and live her life free from abuse:

I’ll wash him off me and plant
perennials, something bright that will flourish among weeds
[…] If they ask
I’ll say it was the old tabby, the children’s favorite. In spring
when the blossoms dance wildly, I’ll scrub my fingernails clean
and invite the neighbors for tea.

And so, despite all of the heartaches in this beautiful and difficult collection, Faulkner still manages to pull off a magic trick, changing the perception of her collection’s title as you read. Some endings are written with violence, but some are written with bright and flourishing perennials, with renewal and discovery. Either way, Faulkner isn’t really asking for your permission.

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Brenna Crotty is the Senior Editor for CALYX. Her reviews and humor articles have been published in CALYX Journal, Cracked.com, and CollegeHumor.com. She lives in Portland, OR, with her husband, son, and cat.