Marnie Ritchie: Anxious Attachment

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.