After the Psych Ward
I think I’ve written the last poem
AAAAOf my book, which doesn’t yet exist
AAAAAAAA(the book, not the poem, which exists
AAAAI swear to you) it’s about longing
(the poem) and its tricks
AAAAThis morning my roommate Nola got me a biscuit
AAAAAAAAA biscuit from the place I like
AAAABrown Butter and now she is in this poem
See how easy it is to get in a poem
AAAAAll you need is to gift me a biscuit
AAAAAAAAAnd have a name that is also a city
AAAAThis year no friends can come to my party
Because of covid which if you are reading this
AAAAIn 40 years which is the plan
AAAAAAAAYou might not know what that is
AAAAOr you know because it’s happened again
And again and again and again and again
AAAAI lost my wallet today
AAAAAAAAToday’s to-do list is
AAAAAAAAFind my wallet
AAAAAAAACut my nails
AAAAAAAAGet pretty
AAAAAAAAMake a salad
AAAAAAAAFuck
AAAAAAAA“Ok I found my wallet” she said
AAAAYou write your world how you want it
She cut her nails with trembling hands
AAAADid you know you can become an I
AAAAAAAAOr a they or a he or a she
AAAAIn just one line one word even
You can be anyone I can be anyone
AAAAA relief to step outside and look
AAAAAAAAThat body’s not a body “when i was a boy”
AAAASaid Frank “I stepped into the sky/ and I was a boy/”
Said Frank “not a surrealist!// part of the dream / is that you accept/
AAAAYour waking life as/ part of the dream”
AAAAAAAAYou don’t need to get too sad
AAAAYou can anyways become Frank
Or a girl or I so the biscuit
AAAAI’m saving that for tomorrow
AAAAAAAAYou can come too you’re invited
AAAAWe will have a party
A virtual party
AAAAWe are all a little sad
AAAAAAAAOk a lot sad all of my friends who can are trying
AAAATo fight fascism and those who can’t
Are trying Never Again is Now is what we’re saying
AAAATo be White is to get to write this
AAAAAAAANot enough nouns here where do the flowers go
AAAAThe bouquet from the farm the farm the dirt
The man the we the I now that I’m 30
AAAAThe kids are asking what do we do
AAAAAAAANow that never again is now Grab the nouns
AAAAI say The Biscuit I say
The Salad the Fingernail the Flower the Farm the Dirt
AAAAIf fuck were a noun i’d say grab that too The Moon
AAAAAAAAwe all can see grab it the all
AAAACan see the hopeful see the hopeful all
Find all the nouns you love and hold them
AAAAHold all the nouns you love
Note: quotes by “Frank” are from The Book of Frank by CA Conrad
Compassion, Fall 2020
The lab tech at Quest Diagnostics apologizes,
answers her phone. I– forearm naked on the table –
listen: her teenage daughter requests pickup. School exposure.
Last summer – the first summer – walking through my childhood
neighborhood: a cartoonish red wheelbarrow, freshly painted on a lawn.
William Carlos Williams was also a doctor.
My mother, a doctor, writes tankas in retirement,
sends me pictures of hummingbirds suspended at the feeder,
yellow beaks sharp as needles, wings a blurred suggestion.
At the start, she floated volunteering at a make-shift clinic.
Just transport, she’d assured of her role at the proposed hospital-
on-the-track-field, gurneys rolling over green below former freshman dorms.
I snapped a picture of that wheelbarrow, showed her. I understand a desire
to help, I said. To feel less helpless. Us around the dinner table, dad’s frittata
and he agreed. I soon changed my mind
and anyways they didn’t, after all, need the overflow space.
You’ve paid your dues, friends told me to tell her, friends furloughed
from their known lives. And mine – alone in my parents’ basement,
unable to leave (like a young child) except for weekly clinic trips for IV saline.
Mom and dad didn’t want me to get them, the infusions,
fearing I’d bring home the unspeakable
from fellow (surely viral) patients in the waiting room.
All six feet away in every direction. Every Wednesday I’d drive
dad’s Subaru to that sole urgent care in town willing to administer IVs. I liked the nurse
who always checked me in. They didn’t take out of state Medicaid
so she gave me a discount, practically radical in light of the $200
per clear liter charged at the nearby IV wellness centers
popping up all over town. Feel better, girl,
she’d said upon my final infusion before moving back to the city,
her blue-gloved hands stretched through two surgical gowns, face double-
masked and goggled, hair blue-capped under a plastic shield.
I know she had two young girls at home, no vaccine yet
and even when, still a decade too young.
Get well soon.
Selling the Childhood Home
Though more accurate would be behind the house,
I would call it my backyard, the river –
what I will most miss.
And the blackberry tangles alongside the road,
taunting ripeness for that one week in July
before disappearing for another year.
None of this is lost, but nothing’s right here.
It is increasingly apparent that right here
is a prerequisite for care.
Aphantasia is where you can’t picture a thing
when you close your eyes and are prompted
to picture it. See star. See apple. See mother’s
hands. How do I know if I can picture a thing
if what happens in my mind, when prompted
to do so, is all I’ve ever known?
ode to phone sex
AAAAafter Ocean Vuong
because no one told us
we could pour
this decade-long night
into our stranded bodies
and call it
home
go ahead – call
an ache
into a name
answer absent
a body
to hold
take time
between two fingers
this now will live
until someone destroys
the evidence
now
come
forge a world
that can never hold us
together
the voice hums
a wave warm
and blood-close
a moment folds
under fences
crowded
with loneliness
listen: miles
are just blankets
for wet skin
The prison photographer makes his rounds,
walking from tiny table to tiny table, asking who wants a Polaroid to commemorate the visit. I buy a photo ticket in the waiting room vending machine to get a picture by this bunkie or friend. We keep fucking it up – a blink at the flash; a strand of hair in the mouth; a last-minute glance away from the insta-camera’s snap and its uneditableproof of err. How to cheat; to stretch a ticket into time. Time into time. How to spend more time holding each other and posing. Posing, holding.
Self on Psych Hold Imagines Future Self After Psych Hold
I will stop doing everything I don’t want to do
like sleeping in past eight or getting bored
in the drugstore self-checkout line.
Ants curling in synchronized task
don’t impress me anymore.
The full moon looks like a raspberry,
a five-year old declares, and this is my magic.
Nothing is not in conversation
with everything. Beneath the clouds
a mountain lion traces a body into a mind
afraid of dying. The pause between inhale
and exhale disintegrates in space, reassembles
as another gray hair. Get all the air out
to sing a little longer. An unwritten letter
teases an ache from the ether. The unopened
prison letter teases out letters for this poem.
Let me hold off transcendence
for another tomorrow. I don’t not want to die,
just not yet.