The first step is completed in the dark; you must learn by touch, practice on already ruined rolls in the light:
1. Be in the dark and remove film from its canister by popping off the end. Church key can openers might be helpful in this process, but you can also use a pair of scissors splayed wide. The latter is not recommended but I was not always so meticulous. Meticulousness takes years and I only had so much time.
No one is born wondering about thirty-two S’s.
That comes later.
I never bled.
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March 2006
He turns thirty-two and spends it shooting pool at a defunct pub, rented and supported by AA club members. This is where I met him in January, where I say my name, chain-smoke, and try to believe in a Higher Power.
Where he clenches Newports between his lips, left side of the mouth, squinting through the smoke as he calls each shot, cue stick in one hand while the other taps twice at whatever pocket he means to make. He wears an oversized leather coat, tanned tawny-brown, and was caught driving drunk three too many times.
I sit in a plastic chair on the south side of the club, matted bleached hair nested against the crown of my head, the crown of my head rested against the cool, cement wall. I’m wary of him but aloof, bored and seventeen. I flick every ash out of each cigarette, methodically twitching Marlboro Reds between my fingers until the cherries dislodge themselves. I light the next one with the ejected embers of its broken predecessor. Sometimes the force of my flickering hand snaps the cigarette in half, my fingers snapping, too, calibrating each movement to a beat:
Ishouldbemoremeticulous-Ishouldbemoremeticulous-Ishouldbemoremeticulous-Snap.
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2. Snip off the end of the film that was peeking out of the canister. Unroll. The film will be smooth. Try not to sweat. It helps to hold the film steady between your index and middle fingers before you make the cut.
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It’s the day after his birthday. It’s storming. He tells me there’s something in the front room of the club I should see. There is nothing to look at but the dark and flashes of his mouth in the lightning’s glare. When he kisses me I hold my mouth closed until he forces his tongue between my teeth. I taste like ketchup. I am smeared with love. We tell this story later, all of it, and laugh. He tells everyone I was his present.
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3. Feed film into a plastic reel. You will fumble in a way that can only be expected from someone standing in the dark. Cut off the spooled end. Remember to use your fingers, clamped, steady as they wait for the snap.
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Soon I’ll attend college and deconstruct. I’ll read Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, Anne Carson. I’ll take pictures, take pictures, wonder about archetypes and Emily Dickinson’s volcanoes and take pictures; try to get inside. I’ll lean in close and I’ll want to get inside and leave and leave and take pictures, take pictures, snap shots of things and selves until I learn to develop the film, to develop film and snap less cigarettes, snap less.
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4. Place the reel into a cylindrical developing tank. Seal its light-proof funnel top on too tight. Step into the light.
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He spits that I think I’m better than him.
I don’t think he ever learns to spell my full name.
July 2020
I turn thirty-two this morning and spend it thieving wildflowers from the Lake Michigan shoreline. White-petaled yellow-centered ox-eye daisies and daisy fleabane. Virginia bluebells and golden bird’s-foot trefoil. I bring them home and press them hard between two pieces of white paper, between corrugated cardboard, between slabs of pine, between wingnuts, washers, and bolts. I leave the Echinacea and Queen Anne’s lace to shrivel three-dimensionally in a plastic cup on my parents’ counter.
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5. Check the temperature of the developer and pour it into the tank through the funneled opening. Seal it with a lid, again, too tight. You are already in the light.
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They say that wildflowers are technically weeds, but I am trying to be less meticulous, but I am not, but:
weed
noun (2): 2 a. dress worn as a sign of mourning (as by a widow) —usually used in plural
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6. Agitate the tank. Pass it back and forth between your hands for a period of time, depending. Left right left right.
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I picture myself wearing a black dress in plural, but it doesn’t add up. I blur. I try to be less meticulous and again, picture myself in a black dress but this time it has nothing to do with me.
I see instead the word with thirty-two S’s dressssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
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7. Stop.
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Illinois summers are stifling, damp.
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8. Agitate for less time.
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I wear a silk skirt.
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9. Stop.
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It shifts.
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10. Agitate for the same time.
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July 2008
He wants to take me out on his friend’s boat. I wear a hot pink bikini from K-Mart and we all sweat. I stretch my arms to the hot blue sky and arch my back slightly, preparing to stand as we approach the shoreline. My eyes are closed to the sun and when I open them his friend has leaned towards me, trying to hoist himself up and out from the stern to pull it near the dock. I say I’m sorry and wrench my hands down, covering my hot pink breasts.
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11. Stop.
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On the way home he spits, I know what you were doing and I know what you were doing and his words rise up, going white-hot against my sunbaked skin, turn to names no one but him could call me. I agree at least that I am stupid because I really don’t know what I did and he really needs to tell me and when he does I fill to the brim with red hot shame from my breasts to the molten sky. I promise, begging:
I couldn’t see, I couldn’t see, my eyes were closed in the light, in the sun, it was too bright I promise, I promise, I swear I didn’t know, didn’t know he might have seen me stretching in the sun, in the sun, eyes closed to the sun.
There are no pictures taken. Nothing to prove I shouldn’t have known better than to close my eyes in the light.
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12. Empty the liquid and pour in the stop bath. This washes the film in a way that stops it from developing. It will stay where it’s at after this.
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July 2009
The cops show up every once in a while and I can’t always remember what happens, but this time I am wearing a long-sleeved cotton shirt of his, a small hole beneath the left armpit, just long enough to cover my pants-less lower half. This might have been the time one officer knocks at the front door while another guards the back gate. I answer it, I think, or maybe it’s his mom that hears the knocking. He has a warrant, again. He tells me this is all a big mistake and I believe him, standing there half-dressed in his bedroom while a badged-man hovers in the doorway. He laces up his work boots and marches out onto the cement porch. His arms are at his sides with hands pointing anywhere but the hot blue sky and me, growing more meticulous, worries what he will spit later when he realizes my body is in the light like this even with my eyes wide open.
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13. Agitate then wait.
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July 2010
I’ve never driven away from the suburbs of Chicago and am confronted with new worlds on a road trip to Canada. I’m twenty-one years old. I haven’t seen mountains and now here they are, suddenly, a distant backdrop for isolated communities sleeping beneath rotted, sunbaked roofs held up by splintering two-by-fours. I say something that sounds too much like empathy and awe for the lives flickering by us through the car window. When he starts screaming, I don’t understand why and he pulls over in a gas station parking lot.
His neck strains with the weight of his anger, molten blue veins swelling up from the pressure of it and all I have done to shake it loose.
He is spitting again, again, because I don’t understand how he has arrived at this rage.
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14. Pour in the fixer. This holds the image steady, prepares it for the light.
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He spits white-hot words about how I am always sorry for everyone, but him.
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15. Agitate until fixed.
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He threatens to leave me there and I know he’ll do it if I can’t convince him otherwise so apologies dislodge from my throat, reeling, this time from the fear of being left 1,000 miles from home with men I don’t know lingering inside gas station bathrooms. Eventually he agrees to just drive, please, until we get somewhere else, annoyed enough, finally, by my hysterics to listen.
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16. Empty.
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May 2013
We move 800 miles away from the only home I’ve ever known; I know only him. We go to the bar. He gets drunk. He leaves me there. I walk home alone. When I step inside, he is screaming. He insists I care more about everyone else. Exhausted, I tell him he’s right. Then I hide from him in the bedroom. And he kicks in the door.
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17. Rinse.
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I hide from him in the bathroom.
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18. Rinse.
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And he kicks in the door.
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19. Rinse.
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I’m standing in the bathtub.
He steps into the light— fluorescent.
Molten.
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July 2013
When I turn twenty-five we spend the day at a small lake.
I wear a one-piece swimsuit and agree only to stand in the water where no one else can see.
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20. Agitate until you feel it is clean. This, you will learn.
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September 2014
There is a wedding. We invite everyone but don’t sign papers, citing his almost forty years of financial missteps that I would rather not carry as my own. The truth is not that but I am still pretending to be sorry.
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21. Open.
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July 2015
A hot blue summer flickers and I see my own eyes closed in the sun, warm and open to a sky that melted everything back on me because other men had eyes and all the cops at back doors, at front doors and back doors and the plastic window at the county jail separating him and I before Christmas because no one was ever sorry enough for the cops at his back door and I finally walk out of mine.
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22. Eventually you will prefer the chemical smell of the darkroom to any other rooms where there might be things you cannot see.
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But he misses me.
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23. You will understand without understanding that the way to stop anything is to agitate it before bringing it to the light.
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But it’s my birthday. But he wants to go for a hike, but he promises he’ll be fine, but as soon as we’re out of service on our favorite gravel road he spits about me not being sorry enough and his veins go molten and he jumps out of the moving car, ripping his shirt in pieces where I am hanging on as tight as I can.
I stop the car.
The afternoon is hot and dry.
He is frantic, trying to remove the bike from its rack. I am frantic, trying to stop him.
He tells me he is going to kill himself, somewhere in the woods.
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24. You will learn that to fix a thing is to stop it from not being fixed.
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He gets back into the car.
He tells me he could call the cops.
On me.
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25. You will learn to rinse.
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We make it home.
He threatens his own life, again.
A bruise rises to the surface on the back of my arm.
I am suddenly, perfectly, agitated.
Do it.
And I don’t mean it.
And I want to mean it.
And I throw my head back on the front porch, eyes closed and then open.
Hot blue molten flashes of sun, fixed and certain.
I know who he would kill in the dark.
January 2016
When he finally agrees to leave, he comes right back.
I swear to all gods I have no idea.
He lives in my shed.
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26. To rinse.
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One week later he’ll burst in through the back door, eyes glazed over like a crocodile:
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27. To rinse.
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I never left you dumb bitch.
Dumb.
Bitch.
It’s January in South Dakota.
I’m not the one
willingly
sleeping in a shed.
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28. To wait after each ablution until you know what it is to be clean.
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July 2016
My first birthday without him and I feel bound. At 28, I’m afraid of becoming context.
But people start telling me I’ll do alright
after 30
if I’m lucky
if I’m careful
if I start wearing sunscreen
if I start laughing
with my mouth closed
if I stop speeding
on the interstate.
But it’s easier to go for a run at night!
But being pretty enough is like a razor on your wrist sometimes!
But sleep with both eyes open and also you should always be just a little more meticulous!
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29. What it is to be clean is to hold a thing between your fingers before you make the cut.
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July 2020
My parents’ basement stairs are steep and threaten splinters. It’s dark and cool at the bottom, a relief if not for the musty scent of too many things. I’m trying to organize the boxes I stored here before I left for everywhere else and stayed until I didn’t. I find old photography projects from college in a plastic bin: crude self-portraits shot with 35mm film, some naked, some not, long exposures of me blurry in an old black dress, screaming for pretend. Black and white portraits of myself and him, developed directly onto 8×10 sheets of thin transparent plastic, adhered to cottony paper spray-painted gold. The effect is lovely but they are conceptually banal, one-dimensional, obvious: Me with a handful of nails, him with a string of pearls. My fingers splayed across his abdomen, his across mine. Me in my mother’s old silk slip, holding him, naked, him holding me in the same way, like a newborn.
I think about the word weed again, this time as a verb: to get rid of (something harmful or superfluous) —often used with out
I think about what it is to be with out and know that I will always see myself blurring in a black dress, slurring thirty-two S’s, pretending to be sorry.
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30. To get rid of something means you must be with something else.
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I think about the flowers pressed hard. When I check on them the needle-like petals of the daisy fleabane are pinioned to the white paper, limp. I don’t cry when one dislodges itself and almost falls before landing in my upturned palm.
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31. To be in plural you must agitate what is not until it dislodges itself.
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I think about old self-portraits: Holding a lit candle and moving slightly until the wax taper and I become two things each, a long exposure, and the multiple exposure of me walking on the Lake Michigan shoreline, the sand frozen like rippled glass and my feet gnawing at the grainy earth with each step, slowly, until I become four.
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32. To be with out you must open, meticulously, until you open, bereft, into the sweat and blood of your own upturned palm.
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Maggie Dillow is the founding member of the Post-apocalyptic Poets for a Pre-apocalyptic World, a collective dedicated to performance-based poetics, and co-host of the podcast Girlhood Movie Database. Her work has been supported by the Tiny Spoon Residency, the National Women’s History Museum, and the NEH. She is the 2025 recipient of the Anne Spencer Memorial Award through The Poetry Society of Virginia and the proud parent of a perfect guinea pig named Guillermo Girard, who is better than everyone. When she’s not writing, you can find her in the woods and on Substack at Epistles from an American Poet.