Locker Room
Joanna Young
“The whole trouble being that my writing has guts, but I do not.”
—Anne Sexton
She is her own locker room. She is in bed with the world. People
flutter near her. Blush. Die little deaths. Want to leave everything
behind. Marriages. A walled off monastery. It’s not a joke. This is
not calculated at all. She is helpless loving you. Enticing you to
love. Her swimmer’s hips. Long patrician profile. Cupid lips curled
around three-packs a day. You could inscribe her beauty on a coin.
The graceful slender neck asking a jagged, broken question. Who
am I? What is this beauty? Why am I here?
Her death trails her. I marvel at her strength. She is handcuffed to it.
Bracelet of steel. Little iron maid, shackled to the family’s safe deposit
box. Her mother makes clear it does, and does not, belong to her.
Stocks and bonds. Load of family loot. The precipitous will she writes
in blood. Everything crumbling inside the vault. She is barely born
when her death certificate is issued. Notarized on her wrist.
Meticulous in her arrangements. Nothing’s left to chance. Snaps
the lid shut. Does not leave a note. Her blue eyes are what people
remember. Her stark poetry. A cry she carved into the world, word
by word. Carved out of her body. Supplication. Wild confessions.
She documents her final outpost, final breakout. The last lap. Counts
the metronome of waves. God’s liquid Morse code. Rolling compass
rose. She will not return to the shore. This long unnameable thirst.
The awful rowing toward God.
Joanna Young was the writer-in-residence at Millay House Rockland for the month of October 2025. Read Joanna’s essay “Pole Stars and Horizons: On Anne Sexton and the Millay House Rockland Residency”
Photo of Anne Sexton © Virago
