Well, poem #2 shades the meaning of #1 for me. #2 suggests a bar fight involving the guy in #1.
For number #7, in part because of the context (in the bar), and the gender pairing between #1 and #7, it's seems that 'what happened' was either romantic or sexual. With the girl it is easy to think of rape or even consensual sex that she regrets.
Because of the sequence, or that you begin and end with the 'drinking to forget', I have to see them as connected, so that both are drinking to forget the same event. I doubt that a man (or maybe most men) would drink to forget random consensual sex.
Of course, it could be a couple that broke up romantically, or agreed to a divorce. Again the context of a bar and the hook up scene that goes with it suggest sex to me, though.
Gender is such a straitjacket. If I were reading this as a single stanza, with a one word change (man/girl), I absolutely would think of a plethora of possibilities for the guy to be forgetting (bad business deal, for example), but with the girl it would probably be limited to sex or romance. Ridiculous, I know, but even though I know it's ridiculous, I'm still filtering the world that way, to some extent.
If you read them as connected poems, I could see how #2 would really affect the way you read #1, but they’re all totally unrelated.
#2 is actually about being in Sendai City at the time of the big earthquake that happened in 2011. I was only about 8 km from the sea, maybe even less, so I never saw the tsunami that day, but the earthquake itself was terrifying, and learning about the tsunami afterward has left a piece of fear in me ever since.
I now work at a school that is less than 500 meters from the sea, and though I’m happy look out the window and see it, a part of me always wonders what if …
I don’t try to explain all of that, but rather hope that the sensation of having been near enough to experiencing something terrifying that it leaves its mark on you is something that other people can relate to in some way.
I was hoping for people to read #1 and #7 as totally unconnected and unrelated, and then comment on whether the poems had different meanings to them, much like you did at the end of your comment.
I feel the same way as you. If the character is a man, I just assume that he could be thinking about a number of things, but when the character is a girl (not a boy or a woman), what I imagine also tends to be limited to some kind of sexual violation. Obviously, it doesn’t have to be, but for some reason, that’s what comes to mind for me, so I was curious if other people experienced the poems in the same way.
It's also worth noting the difference in readings between 'girl' and 'woman'. 'Girl' is more sexualized than 'woman'; I would think a break up or even divorce more likely if it was a woman in the bar.
I live 25 miles from the ocean. We haven't had a 'big one' in this area for over 500 years, so we're either about due, or it's something I don't need to worry about in my lifetime. I try not to think about it, but there are tsunami warning signs everywhere.
I completely agree. I also think it’s funny how saying the girl at the bar sounds completely normal, but (for me, at least) saying the boy at the bar sounds kind of ridiculous, like there’s a 10 year kid sitting at the bar drinking away his traumas.