Forward, Back, Nothing: A Look at Stacy Boe Miller’s “Uptown Girl”
Nostalgia—what a trap. It isn’t just the joy that is intoxicating but the pain of the past as well, the familiarity of those recalled moments. I’ve read that rewatching a show can be a coping mechanism against anxiety, a way to regulate emotions. I imagine nostalgia behaves in a similar fashion; even as we push the bruised, tender parts of our past we find comfort. From the title onward, “Uptown Girl” by Stacy Boe Miller is a recollection of things exciting and terrifying, the precipice between childhood and adulthood, those moments one could “crack like / pond ice any / minute.”
I haven’t been in the same vehicle as my older brother in decades; siblings themselves occupy that space between past and present, a unique relationship that exists roughly in the same timeline and shared, childhood reality. When Miller opens with “My brother and I / drove to Wal Mart / an hour away” I am back to a time when my brother drove me around and when places like Wal Mart were an hour away.
Of course, there are images and items that rewind me as well. Boom boxes (I can still picture my brother’s silver, double-cassette, cracked-cover-on-the-right-speaker boom box, rows of tapes from Public Enemy to Beastie Boys, Sir Mix-a-Lot to BDP) and even trains themselves bring me right back to Elk River, Minnesota, where I spent a portion of my formative years. Even the rhythm and snap of Miller’s language is a time machine, the lines “Boom box, battery packed. We could crack…” feels like the music I grew up listening to, that boom bap from the boom box. It’s bittersweet what we lose growing up. (But to have grown up with things worth losing…I can’t complain, honestly.) But as I said in the beginning, nostalgia is a trap, and Miller seems to understand this: our childhoods, the place we grew up, “The whole town / a warning.”
During a school assembly, Miller writes about “an engineer saying, / I remember one lady / I killed. So casual,” but the speaker wasn’t thinking about the engineer. They were thinking about the brother’s letterman jacket they wore, how they hoped someone would think they had a boyfriend. I love that moment, confessional and true to the youthful mind. Then it happens, that crack like pond ice.
When we get to the end (“I covered / my mouth at the screen”) we are confronted by the unavoidable:
a woman in her truck
looking for a way forward
or back, and then the train,
And then nothing.
It ends there. On “nothing,” that emptiness, that shock and absence. I said it twice already but in keeping with the rule of three, let me state again that nostalgia is a trap. It works to keep one in a single place, stuck between “looking for a way forward / or back” and not moving in either direction. Miller walks that line between “Uptown Girl” and “a woman in her truck.” She knows being caught can lead to a kind of death. Based on the skill of this poem and others from Miller we’ve published and read, I can confidently say if anyone can get out of a trap, it’s her, even if it means gnawing off her own powerful legs.
