These poems are published as part of the Amplifying Disabled Voices special section, selected by editors Christopher Heuer, Marlena Chertock, and Gregory Luce.

left unsaid

nights on the psych ward, my family lies in bed
with me. even in our mostly estranged state,
i hold onto their sadness, & can’t let go
of mine. they never checked in but i can never
check out. all over the unit the halls go dark,
but sleep only comes through chemicals
the way wastewater percolates a leach field.
as i wait for the relief of unawakeness
in the bed i’ve been assigned,
the nurse’s station shines like a beacon.
yet nothing good is there. unless you count the dulling
of an ache that returns & returns. they’ve got plenty of that—
in many colors & shapes—but when they hand you
the little paper cups where your dreams grow, know
you are swallowing more than you bargained for.

tossing & turning on the vinyl-wrapped mattress, waiting
for my mind to eclipse itself, i remember my outside life.
that three-day weekend my brothers visited me,
their friend’s disappearance & probable suicide hanging
in the air. suddenly i’m back with them in that present.
& nothing is past or tense. we joke wildly about our crazy
family; everything painful is up for grabs—
clay pigeons tossed like targets. the three of us trying
to outdo one another, our sharp tongues like knives
being honed on each other’s whetting stones.
i laugh ’til i almost pee.

but the friend still hovers.
it’s the thing we don’t say to one another.
it’s the only thing we talk about.

that whole weekend, far too much of me is left
unsaid. parts that need to be heard & held.
my struggles stay as dark as these hallways.
when no questions are asked,
you’re still left with an answer.

      ~                               ~                                ~

days on the psych ward, there’s plenty to say:
mornings when they make us rate our potential for self-harm,
the too-lean teen with shaved head & bandaged wrists
insists she has no safety number: Jesus is my safety net.
or the middle-aged scraggly-beard who needs to recite
every Rush concert he’s ever seen each time they table us
for lunch. or art room afternoons, the young man with an old soul
lets slip with a timid grin he believes Appalachian Spring
to be the cause of & solution to all his problems.
i envy them their delusions, the luxury of denial.

all of us far too aware how our brains can’t
handle what got put there. & how there’s too much
to say about that. but i speak very little,
even in group. i see no point
in playing catch when i know no one
will get the balls i toss.

with the TV blaring at the blank stares in the day room, i’m sifted
through the remains of that weekend with my brothers.
& i realize then, years after i should have known this
as clearly as my grandmother’s wrinkles
are invading the back of my hands,
my brothers & me—
we don’t bleed the same way.
 

Pattern of Barely

I forgot where I’d put the ocean.
And all the languages it spoke. Stuck
in a pattern of barely. Eating and sleeping
became daily mountains I had to.
Climb. Backwards.
In the rain.
On my knees.

I’d wanted to carve a boundary,
using a river as a guide. At that point,
the dog was with me. Now I know
what I thought I knew
I never did. Would need to repeat
for the foreseeable future.
It’d be a long time before

any kind of understanding could leave
its teeth in me. Too many nights,
moon muffled by clouds.
Too many weeks, prone
to the couch. Foreverly stale
as a blank page, writing another
etiolated letter to someday.

I’d wanted to grow an ability
to be soft again, to unfetter
my breath, stop waiting
for the next awful uphill thing.
Later I quit what was left
of the job, leaving me even more
poor again. An archetype of scant.

What engines the darkness
fell down my throat. Too often
my stomach masquerades
as a parking lot. Too chronic
for words. Which
medicine? What
medicine?

Inside my skull
a wolf keeps howling.
I want to let her go.

Anne Rankin’s poems have appeared in The Healing Muse, The Poeming Pigeon, The Awakenings Review, Hole in the Head Review, Passager, Scapegoat Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, Whale Road Review, Kelp Journal, Abandoned Mine, Does It Have Pockets?, kerning, The Bluebird Word, Boomer Lit Magazine, Rattle, and Maine Public Radio’s Poems from Here. Her poem “Dear Acadia National Park” will appear in the forthcoming anthology, The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders. Her essays have appeared in The Columbus Dispatch, The Mount Desert Islander, and The Washington Post (for “Life Is Short Autobiography as Haiku”); and she has a short story forthcoming in The Main Street Rag.

Featured image in this post is, “Moon and clouds over Goulburn” by CephasOz, licensed creative commons via Wikimedia Commons.