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“The Surrender Theory traverses the landscapes of love & grief with unwavering footsteps. These poems dive into vulnerability with their eyes wide open. I’m grateful to have spent time with this collection while navigating my own grief-broken heart. Thank you, Caitlin, for the reminder that it is worth it to live for the things we love.”

— Sabrina Benaim, author of Depression and Other Magic Tricks

“Many have tried to describe the multitude of ways that grief can hold you, but none have come close to the way Caitlin transports you back into the feeling of its arms. The Surrender Theory is an engaging and accessible way to remember what it feels like to love. What it feels like to lose. The beauty in this collection lies in Caitlin’s ability to detail her truth in a way that feels universal. We all have been touched by the feeling of yearning. This poetry will help you understand the depths of it. It will help you understand that you don’t have to get lost in it.”

— Ari B. Cofer, author of Paper Girl and the Knives That Made Her

“Conlon knows the essence of capturing an audience. Her signature voice is familiar and comforting, like she knows a part of you that even you have yet to discover. Anyone who has felt grief and the complexity of the human experience will confide in Conlon’s work. She has the ability to see life through its clutter and she will show you that you can too.”

— Zane Frederick, author of i am tired of being a dandelion

Dedication

For Dolly

Content Warning: this book contains sensitive material related to death, grief, and mental health.

Start of Content

THE SURRENDER THEORY

there isn’t much that scares me more

than my own heart

a monster

of tenderness.

I have an irrational fear that I’ll wake to find it

perched at the

foot of my bed

begging to be torn apart, consumed

in the name of compassion.

& that’s incredibly terrifying

for a few different reasons but

mainly because I’d do it.

I’ve never needed an excuse

to sacrifice myself for love.

I’m a martyr for everything soft.

I confess to you: I’d bleed for anything

if it held me the right way.

I confess:I have.

I have.

I CAN TELL IT’S AQUARIUS SEASON BECAUSE MY KNUCKLES ARE SPLITTING

What I thought was forever was just

last year. My body has attempted every

rebellion at least twice. Like ice in a

snowstorm, the future has solidified

on the doorknobs. It asks me for the key.

There’s no way I’m making it out of here alive.

THE POET HAS A ONE-SIDED CONVERSATION WITH HER JOURNAL

Do you ever get the impression

that you’re on the wrong side

of your own life?

I just mean that sometimes it feels like

a constant battle between wanting it

to feel the same, and knowing that it

shouldn’t.

Okay, so I wrote myself out of the dark

but I can feel it creeping back in.

Is it too late to outrun my fate?

OBSERVATION

I don’t know it’s the last time which is, by nature,

what makes it a last time. When you can predict the

future every juncture

splinters

into smaller junctures,

last time after last time after last time. When you

don’t, can’t know, what awaits you, the moment just

is. It breathes. Looks around.

I look around. Pitbulls and Parolees plays on the

television, our conversation punctuated by barks and

howls. An off-white curtain separates her from

another patient, a patient I never see the face of. In an

emergency she’d be the first one out of the room.

I had to cut through a lobby, take an elevator, and

walk down a hallway to get here. I turned right into

the doorway. I will turn left to leave. If I write about

the setting it gives me an excuse to turn away from its

center. The catalyst, my grandmother.

She holds my hand, briefly, and doesn’t sound like a

person that’s known almost eighty Februarys, almost

eighty Valentine’s Days. That’s a lot of love, I want to

say, a lot of snow, but then I’d have to admit I’m not

listening as well as I should because I’m assuming

that there’s endless time to say everything I need to

say.

And why shouldn’t I? She’s healthy, active. She goes

to the doctor. She knows who I am.

She asks about [redacted].

How was your date with [redacted]?

“We should look into getting you birth control.”

I laugh. In my memory I slow this down, freeze

frame. I love her. In slow motion I love her fiercely.

Later I will regret spending so much time talking

about [redacted]. I will hate myself for describing in

detail the meal [redacted] cooked for us instead of

saying thank you. Thank you for every insignificant

thing. Thank you for leaving me notes on the kitchen

counter with chocolate whenever I go to bed sad.

Thank you for the singing toothbrushes and telling me

that my writing is beautiful. Even then, when it wasn’t

quite beautiful. Just loud. At 19 I needed everyone to

share my bellyaches. At 19 I walk out of the room that

becomes our final private memory and think what if

this is the last time and promptly ignore it.

Look at her, sitting up with a pillow behind her.

Orange juice in a sealed cup on the side table.

This is not what an ending looks like, waving at me

from the doorway. Gown catching on a thin blanket. It

can’t be. It isn’t. I turn left. I keep going. I keep going

until I can breathe.

PANTOUM FOR WAITING ROOMS

& nobody ever tells you that life is full of mini-deaths,

or that // it never gets easier to erase your past into

memory. // Memory — little more than obsessive

remembering but we feed it like a habit, // until the

heart transcends the body & its tiresome hunger.

It never gets easier to erase your past into memory. //

When my grandmother died I watched a million little

deaths become a cloud. // Until the heart transcends

the body & its tiresome hunger // you cannot escape

the hands of it.

When my grandmother died I watched a million little

deaths become a cloud // & they hovered over her

body for warmth, mourning their penultimate death. //

You cannot escape the hands of it. // Every day

another part of me crawls into unnameable territory.

& they hovered over my body for warmth, mourning

their final death. // The doorway said “know, that god

hears prayers” so I became an atheist. // Every day

another part of me crawls into unnameable territory. //

Thank [ ] for that.

DOUBLE VISION

My grandmother’s body

was still warm and I was reckless enough to

call him mine. His hands on my bare waist like

electric paddles and I didn’t care because I was

immortal. If death has taught me anything it’s that I’m

alive and dangerously close to the boiling point. The

next day

my grandmother’s body

was cool and I drove to his apartment just to

unbutton a pair of jeans. I didn’t tell him that I felt

like the Main Character of The Grief Story, that I

knew my body less than he did, but I repeated I trust

you, I’m ready, I trust you, I’m ready when what I

really meant was closer to I could, I want to, and even

this knowledge would only come to me once it was

over.

My grandmother

wasn’t a ghost yet and I allowed him to

become the entire sky above me. My whole life —

split open in every way imaginable. There isn’t much

that I can recall in detail but I know he washed his

hands. I can smell the latex, picture the fresh razor

burn. And, of course, I remember the lights. How he

turned them off and snored and I thought is this all

there is? Is this it? Am I even here at all?

Then, all at once,

I knew.

THE AFTERMATH

I’m waist-deep in April

but my stomach is in February.

In the parking lot outside of my pharmacy

I stare at an orange bottle of antidepressants

that insurance no longer covers.

If my therapist were still my therapist

I’d say mindfulness isn’t cutting it anymore.

The problems I blew into her tissues

seem unbearably simple, now.

Nobody was dead.

I’d yet to experience the romantic love I craved

so deeply, and therefore had never sat, helpless,

within its endless darknesses.

I gorged on happiness hours before its expiration date. Potential

stretched before me like a dinner table.

Life is magnificent just before it tries to kill you.

Mere weeks before graduating

out of my treatment program

I shared my illogical fear

of being abandoned in the center of my life,

hidden from anyone that could possibly understand me.

Some people, I divulged, are bigger than forgetting.

I don’t think I’m one of those people.

CODED SIGNALS

You’ll be happy to hear that I’m trying not to use the

word love as a placeholder for what I really want to

say STOP This is not because I suddenly know what

to say COMMA but because even in the privacy of

my own body I prioritize your grief STOP As if you’ll

even know STOP As if you want me to STOP How’s

this for a placeholder STOP I don’t know what I

believe in anymore but I know it isn’t god STOP Or

love STOP Or you

STOP

There I goSTOPTainting everything by writing

it down STOPEven then I couldn’t escape entirely

from the rabbit hole of that word STOPAnd here

I am COMMA granting you immortality on a page

when the story is as simple as “you left”

STOP

I can’t keep sitting here COMMA elbows deep in the

thought that this just wasn’t supposed to work out for

us STOP

You can’t keep blaming this on timing when the

minute hand is underneath your tongue STOP Was it

not enough that I let you rewrite my history STOP

Was it not enough STOP Was I not enough STOP

I MISS YOU STOP SO MUCH STOP AND I DON’T KNOW STOP WHAT TO DO STOP

I STOP DO STOP NOT STOP KNOW STOP HOW STOP TO STOP LET STOP THIS STOP

go

LIES

after Yena Sharma Purmasir

I did not know heartbreak at a young age / Intimacy

comes naturally to me / I’m the type of person that

leaves and doesn’t look back / I’ve forgotten why it

hurts so much to be alone / Nothing reminds me of

him / I’m fluent in more than one language / I have

never thought at length about how I will die / I have

never met anybody that reminded me of a sunflower /

I always know exactly what to say / It has only ever

been like this / The possibility of a higher being has

never felt realistic / I have never used a Ouija board / I

have never tried to communicate with something that I

knew was dead / Depression does not prevent me

from taking care of myself / I will sit in the driveway,

alone, and have no idea what stops me from walking

inside / It is possible for me to feel safe when I am not

being loved / I believe that it will always ache this

terribly / I wrote you a letter and never sent it / I drove

home at dawn and did not think once, not even once,

about your mouth.

FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING

i feel like a papercut that never stops bleeding,

a rifle discharging into a thicket

named after your brother.

in my head we have more than a bedroom

and some unfinished letters to our legacy.

i rewrite our boring, unremarkable memories

and turn us into a fairytale.

the reality is that i still think of you as bandaid and ointment

when you’re closer to emaciated animal

or beaten path to elsewhere.

this was never supposed to be a metaphor for anything.

i just wanted to love you. i tried so hard to do it right.

ROUTINE MAINTENANCE

Which grief can I live with today? I’ve barely been

awake five minutes when the question arrives,

tail tucked between its legs, waiting for an answer.

This is what I’ve learned

after months of meandering between melancholies:

it’s easier to lick the wounds of a battered heart

than it is to raise someone from the dead.

LINGUISTICS

in a language that doesn’t have the word ‘love’ I say,

“the receipt from the film we watched on our first date

is still tacked on my bulletin board.” I say, “I bought

four red sweaters after you told me your favorite

color.” I say, “it’s been exactly two hundred and

twelve days since our last kiss.” I say, “last week, in a

hotel room, the complimentary shampoo was the

same kind that you use.” I say, “I walked around

smelling like you and nobody else cried over it.” I say,

“yes, I’m still crying over it.” I say, “the other day a

stranger’s phone sang with the same noise you used

for your alarm and it took me all day to figure out

where I knew it from.” I say, “I’m terrified of

someday not knowing where I knew it from.” I say,

“every poem I’ve written lately is about the same

thing.” I say, “I’d almost give up writing altogether if

it meant we could try again.” I say “please,” I say

“please,” I say

“please”

TITLES FOR FUTURE BREAKUP POEMS

1.Earth, Wind & Fire Wrote A Song About Your Birthday

2.It’s September And I’m Feeling Sentimental About Your Liver

3.It’s Nowhere Near September And Your Name Is Not A Song

4.WHY IS IT SO HARD TO CALL THIS WHAT IT WAS

5.Can I Call Someone “Mine” If They Never Understood Me?

6.If I Called…

7.If I Called Would You Remember The Words?

8.You Were My First Everything And I Want Them All Back

9.Everyone Likes Me Better When I’m Not Talking About You & I Don’t Blame Them (Or You)

10.Do I Really Need To Write Another Poem Where We Break Up?

11.What If I Left Us Open To Interpretation?

12.I Think Of You On September 21st, And On Days That Are Not September 21st

13.I Think Of Regular, Ordinary Things, Throughout My Regular, Ordinary Life, And Sometimes You Arrive. Unannounced. I Don’t Panic, Because Nothing Could Ever Make Me Miss Us More Than I Missed Us While We Were Still Together.

ARE YOU LYING TO YOURSELF?

No, but I’m dishonest. No, but I’m forgetful. No, but

I’m creating an emergency out of the way I don’t

recognize myself in the mirror. No, but I’m putting a

period on the end of my adolescence and hoping that

completes it. No, but I’m lying to everyone else. No,

but maybe. No, but sometimes the absence is better

than the truth. I say “no” because I’m too afraid of

“yes.” I repeat the same thing over and over, hoping it

will distract you from seeing how little I know myself

at all.

& that’s the truth.

I don’t know who I am anymore.

PAREIDOLIA

It’s been over a year and I still look for him

in everything. A reflex I can’t stop responding to.

I cling with blistered hands and bitter heart to any

story, any fiction, any song remotely like ours, as if

it’ll give our conclusion meaning.

Or, at the very least, a name I can call out

when I’m fading away.

Even in make-believe kitchens that were never written to hold his

body, his fingerprints decorate the sugar jar.

Every time I confuse us with adults in love

I move further away from the reality

of whatever we were.

I REENACT “THE LAST FIVE YEARS” IN MY KITCHEN INSTEAD OF GOING TO THERAPY

I close my eyes and imagine the scenario

which never changes. My ex

has come to see the show not knowing

I’m playing the lead. I am the grand surprise,

the knife in his evening, a smile dripping with

promises quickly retracted. For an hour

and sixteen minutes my name is Cathy Hiatt.

Singing to my chipped kitchen cabinets

is the only release I have from these endless days

of pushing through windows.

Props line the countertops, ready to supplement

choreography I’ve memorized, blending fiction

and reality into an edible pulp.

It’s for the art, I tell myself backstage, shaking in the

living room, tears like the Hudson. You’re acting, and

it’s for the art, and you’re on stage, and this is real

life, so don’t mess up, girl. You auditioned for this

role. You fit it so perfectly.

Always it comes down to both of us, Cathy and

Caitlin, sitting on linoleum

after the curtain’s been drawn shut, wondering

how he could’ve given up so easily.

Contemplating the words we should’ve said

instead of written into a song, or poem.

And then there’s him, moving on,

reinventing the world with little more than a pen.

We weren’t asking to be rescued.

No, we just wanted to be the type of girl

he’d come home to.

At the center of our heartbreak is a summer day

set to melody, ten minutes of forevers,

climbing, climbing, climbing

until there’s nowhere left but

down.

No matter our role in the undoing

he didn’t have to leave like that.

YOU COOKED FOR ME

once, in the time that we were together. Pasta.

Vegetarian.

I leaned against your doorway, not yet comfortable

in any place that belonged to you, and said

how touched I was that you’d listened to my nervous

babble on our first date. No meat, but dairy is fine.

It felt like the kindest thing anyone had ever done

for me — mixing handmade pesto in a white bowl.

Clearing away a stack of unopened mail from a stool

so I could sit and watch the steam rise.

In retrospect I can see that you gave me very little

and I tried to build an entire future with it.

You must understand, I had never been remembered

like that, before.

With purpose. Without begging for it.

I took what I was offered and ran.

NICK CARRAWAY WAKES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, AND REACHES FOR A PEN

I wonder how this would’ve played out

if you’d known all along that I was going

to write about it. If you’d known my intention

was to expose the green light as metaphor, trip

over the white silk curtains,

would you have said my name any differently?

Ours was a story that begged for clarity.

While love was sleeping it was me that ripped

away the sheets and identified it as obsession.

I refuse to apologize for honesty even if all

it’s left me with are ghosts. Does it bring you back?

No. Does it accurately depict how much

I cared for you? Also no.

The signs that I should’ve noticed sooner have

followed me and I welcome their stare, so much

like yours, seeing a certain reliability in me

and never bothering to name it. So maybe I’m

too late. Maybe life is little more than a car crash or a

sweltering city but dammit, I loved you so much that I

made you the hero of the story rather than the fool.

I wrote you face-down in the pool and rowing into

the past, slow enough for me to catch the wake of

you, lapping against my chest like a grateful animal

or a current of grief.

You were the death of an ideal I’d never tasted but

dreamt of swimming across. I rue the hours I wasted

holding my breath for a fantasy. This was never

going to end the way I wanted it to.

I knew this, and still tried to give you an ending

worthy of history.

You died for love, like you’d always wanted.

Crimson enveloping your body in a cloud of

gunpowder and chlorine. Later,

Judgment and I would stand over your possessions

remembering parties thrown for a future that could

never be. A future that language couldn’t have

accommodated.

Nowadays I don’t know what to do with my hands.

I write. I say your name over and over

until it isn’t a word. I sit outside and weep

into the daisies until memory becomes less of a

burden

and more of a fact. At the end of the day you are still

gone and I am still a storyteller, sitting on a chair

you will never touch, staring into an abyss

that remains silent despite the hole I have torn into it

with my suffering. Accompanied only by the blue

jays, and their songs like tender mourning.

FIELD NOTES

ok, so here’s what i know. i have to keep talking

because the silence is underwhelming.

i feel like a busy intersection of

green stop signs.

sometimes the only place i can bear to leave us

is at the beginning.

BELATED QUESTIONS

there are at least a million ways to set fire to

something but only one good way to put it out. so

maybe i smothered us. can you forgive me for wanting

this so badly that i ruined the couch cushions? i used

to daydream about running into you in public, because

i needed you to see how much better i was doing but,

looking back, maybe i just wanted assurance that

you’re still alive. how do i talk about all of that

without making it seem like i’m still obsessed with

you? is it healthy to care, distantly, and with no stake

in the situation, for the person i knew you were going

to be? in any burning building there are at least two

exits but when everything’s red how are you supposed

to read the signs? i’m asking too many questions

again, i know. this doesn’t seem like my story to tell

anymore but what was this situation if it wasn’t mine?

even now, there are veins of you stretching away from

my own. memories i don’t want to bury because of the

person i would kill in the process. she was so eager,

unafraid of what love could do to her. what it did. if i

could give you one last thing it would be this: i no

longer think of you with yearning, only curiosity.

NEW VOICEMAIL
9:02 AM
22 SECONDS

The wet dog of desire jumps into my bed and I let it.

I’ll sleep next to anything if it means I won’t be alone.

WHERE MY GRANDMOTHER HIDES

I find her at the bottom of every glass I drink from.

It’s always the same — I’ll tip my head back for one

final, blissful gulp, and then find her staring back at

me from the emptiness. She is as I remember her;

alive. Curly dyed-blonde hair rustles around flushed

skin as I adjust the cup for a better look. An avalanche

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