Still Memory - Mary Karr

        In the poem, "Still Memory", the author talks about the past and what was a typical day during her childhood. She talks about her father coming home from work early in the morning, her mother making coffee, and sister walking on the bathroom tiles. In reality Mary Karr's father did work in the oil industry and her mother was a stay-at-home artist. Her family struggled for money, as it says in the poem as well. It says that the only heat they had was generated from their body and mentions the water boiling water in a "battered old drip pot." So I thought that was interesting that this poem was most likely a non-fiction piece.
       There are a lot of parts that contradict the title of "Still Memory." Movement is found throughout like when she says her sister "steps fast" and how the town where she lives is beginning to "grow animate, its pulleys and levers set in motion." I believe this contradiction is here because she looks back and feels like she was frozen in time when her life was a struggle and it was the same uneventful routine everyday. The only way she got through it and coped was from her writing as she says in the last stanza, "My ten-year-old hand reaches/ for a pen to record it all/ as would become long habit." This was her recording that frozen time period of her childhood.