Artist’s Statement: “The Girl I Used to Be”

Sam Gillmore

Now in its 54th year, University of Detroit Mercy’s Dudley Randall Poetry Prize continues Dudley Randall’s legacy of amplifying creative voices within our community. Below is winner of this year’s first prize, “The Girl I Used to Be,” and an artist statement by poet Sam Gillmore. Read the rest of this year’s prize-winning poems at udmercy.edu/dudley.

The Girl I Used to Be

My mom said I’m a pretty crier.
I sit and watch her tears fall in my mirror.
I stare at my lips, salted with the memories of
nights drenched in smoke and stolen liquor bottles

and the deceptive freedom of having
nothing to lose.
I can’t hear the voice of God when
I see my own reflection.

I toy with the idea of one more rendezvous with
that young girl I hardly recognize anymore just to tell her
I miss her terribly and maybe just one more night together,
just us, for old time’s sake or for the love that used to be there

but I see my mother’s hands smooth my hair and I am reminded of
the pain that used to be there, too.
I miss when we pretended not to be afraid,
riding fury-spoked bicycles on the breeze of a summer prayer.

The haze of suburban glamour gave a teenager two swords and
stripped her of sight. The onslaught of springtime made me
a woman before her time and what else to keep your girlhood but
to die still a girl? I wish I could tell her that

I finally swept the sheared hair up from where
she left it on the bathroom floor, the same floor we
floated unconscious on when she pierced my ears. But
she is still running from us

so fast that her favorite shoes grew holes on my feet and
I am beating wings worthless of a butterfly. I try to tell her
how to love me but my words split into tongues and I try to write
how to love me but my language circles an unsayable drain.

I will love her, instead. With each turn of the hourglass, there is
nothing I can do to break her fall as the grains of salt slip
through the lonely neck.
She told me Jesus smelled the wood of the cross and

thought of home. I smell the smoke of burning leaves and
think of her. I try to meet the gaze of the prodigal son but
all I see is my mother’s foolish daughter. I think of
the things that pass for love and everything

I have allowed others to do. I think, too, of the Good Book
my grandmother palmed through and I try to imagine
the chapel that cradled my ribbon-haired mother.
My story starts when hers ends but

I have to learn things the hard way
to have something to call my own

Artist’s Statement

I think because people are natural storytellers, we hope that our life unfolds as a narrative, too. It can be disappointing to learn that isn’t true. Poetry functions in a more life-like fashion: we are given bits and pieces of experience through our senses, and it is up to us to create using what we are given. However, that means sometimes, we can get stuck trying to figure out how to make something fit linearly into what we consider sensical. This is where poetry contains its power: the puzzle pieces do not need to fit together for an experience to be whole. It makes room for a different kind of emotional nuance in which multiple conflicting realities are allowed truth. 

I find myself incorporating Christian parables into the majority of my art because those are the stories my mom tells me. My mom will always be my muse because it is when I am made parallel to her that I begin to understand myself – and it helps that she is an amazing proofreader. She is the first to read anything I write, and I could not have finished this piece without her support. She always told me that some people have to learn things the hard way, meaning that they must live through a lesson to fully understand it. It is not enough for me to live a lesson, I must also write it to bear my own witness.

I am a collector of words. I am always toying with different combinations, and I have notebooks full of lists of different “sticky phrases” – the words I cannot seem to shake out of my head. They are a medley of conversations I have had, introspections that have crossed my heart, and reflections of other art I have encountered. My writing mirrors the way I exist because I, too, am a collection of everyone I have ever known before. I loved writing this poem. Finally, these sticky phrases lined up with memories that have lingered for far too long. Putting pen to paper was a chance to finally give them a home together, forging a testament to my healing. I think it is a universal experience to look back at yourself and wish someone could have saved you. As I grow, I continue to grieve myself along the way, and it is too easy to put down roots in that grief.