"Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women"
This quote, the poem's first line, references something that the speaker's mother used to say to her when she was a child. These locked rooms are full of hidden emotions, traumas, fears, and desires. It references a mother trying to transmit what she knows—that a woman's body contains coiled masses of volatility, and that some men or lovers are able to access these secret places while others force their ways in.
"I point to my body and say Oh this old thing? No, I just slipped it on."
This quote references the speaker's detachment from her own body. The house metaphor is the main way she detaches herself from her flesh—but here she describes her body as clothing, something that can be discarded. This might reference the speaker's desire to escape or dissociate from her physical form for a variety of reasons—the memory of sexual abuse, body image issues, or other things that women often suffer from. The body can be thrown away. She tries to act nonchalant about it, but really this quote belies a deep fear and horror of the self, revealing the extent to which the speaker wants to escape from the house that contains all of her memories.
"Are you going to eat that? I say to my mother, pointing to my father who is lying on the dining room table, his mouth stuffed with a red apple."
The first part of this disturbing line is a quote attributed to the speaker, likely when she was young and lived at home with her parents. It shows that the speaker is very aware of the hatred or turmoil brewing between her parents, going so far to imply that her mother thinks of her father as a pig and would devour him given the chance. Again, like the previous line, this line is spoken casually but reveals deep wounds of familial trauma.
"I should tell you about my first love who found a trapdoor under my left breast nine years ago, fell in and hasn’t been seen since. Every now and then I feel something crawling up my thigh. He should make himself known, I’d probably let him out."
This quote appears to be the speaker's attempt to bring some element of lightness or hope into the poem. The phrase I should tell you implies that the speaker realizes it is time to puncture the darkness with a memory of something good, some kind of love that didn't wound her. It describes an early relationship, an innocent first love who she still keeps in her heart.
Memories of this first love return to her sometimes, crawling up her thigh; this phrase has both sexual and insect-like undertones, once again locating the poem between the space of the horrifying and the sensual. She thinks if he revealed himself to her, she might let him out; she doesn't want to cling to him, perhaps she wants to view him as an equal, to see him on his own terms, but she cannot find him and so continues to feel whispers of him every once in a while—this one good love.
"Knock knock. Who’s there? No one."
This is a sort of twisted knock-knock joke. Once again, humor is a stand-in for darkness. Like the line, "Oh, this old thing?" that compares the body to clothes but reveals internal detachment or a desire to escape the body, this line reveals the speaker's internal sense of hollowness. She feels that the house of her body is empty. Perhaps her being has been shattered in so many directions by what she has experienced that she feels she does not have a singular self anymore.
