Domestic and Sexual Violence
The poem is dotted with memories of searing pain. From the first moment where the speaker tells us of how she said no but was not listened to during a sexual encounter, to her descriptions of her father and her encounters with a social worker, the speaker seems to be using the poetic form to explore or map her traumatic experiences. The brutal descriptions of men breaking their way into the house-bodies of women evoke the complex layers of trauma that occur following sexual abuse.
Failed Romance
The speaker's relationship with men is fraught from the start of her life, when her mother warns her that men will try to break in with hammers. Her mother's relationship with her father also appears to be extremely troubled. Yet romance and love appear in the poem too, and the speaker fondly wonders about her first love, who still wanders around somewhere inside her.
The poem is also about the way that the speaker emotionally hurts or traps men, keeping them inside her; her body is a house "where love comes to die," indicating that she has had many experiences with unsuccessful love. It is about the fragmentation of relationships and the loss of control and clarity in love, and the speaker mourns her own inability to keep love alive within her.
Returning Memories
The poem is a collage of memories, which return like surreal images popping up in dreams, both terrible and wonderful. She remembers her first love touching her nine years before. She feels the memory of him crawling up her thigh; she feels the ghosts of people she has loved before, or people who have harmed her, wandering around her insides. Even the title is based on a memory of something her mother said to her. The speaker obviously collects memories and keeps them inside, just as she keeps her past loves; sometimes she chains them up and sometimes she wishes they'd reveal themselves, but always she is haunted by the past.
The Body-Mind Connection
The poem focuses on the female body as it experiences love and pain, but these events have very real effects on the speaker's mental state, translating into her own inability to love or maintain love. The body-house takes on a sort of spiritual space, reflecting the speaker's mindset, shifting as she feels something new or remembers something old.
