Ode to the Modified Serenity Prayer
“Grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change,
the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it’s me.”
Your daughter camps near the methadone
clinic in a sea of bench and canal sleepers.
She’s lost another phone or charger or backpack,
wears a ball cap over her sunburnt face.
You could tell her to go back to the hospital
or sober living or Soul Surgery Treatment Center
or the 90-day rehab she left after four days.
You could drive her to Walmart, the Dollar Store,
buy her a phone charger, more clothes, shoes,
instant coffee, oatmeal, peanut butter, candy,
wring your hands, feel sick to your stomach
as she smiles, climbs out of your car, saying, “Yes,
I’d rather live on the street.” You could pretend
she’s gone to Woodstock, that it’s 1969, that addicts
are just kids passing through a phase where they drop
acid, wear tie-dye, dance in the rain to Canned Heat.
Or you could repeat the modified serenity prayer
over and over and over and over,
then drive home, park your car, kiss your own
goddamn good life just as four geese fly over
your flowered front yard and honk.
*
Driving to pick up my daughter while wearing a purple T-shirt graphic-ed with Edvard Munch’s The Scream
~ “Do whatever you can do to support her healthy choices, not enable.” ~
— my grief therapist
Head down, hands on the wheel,
breathe in the screeching bus, the careening
light rail, the two lanes of traffic closed
by a row of orange cones.
Breathe in 19th Ave. – a street
to avoid when you can.
Overflowing trash cans,
people lost or stumbling
or sleeping on a bench under a tarp.
Breathe. Breathe. Look up
at the unexpected flash of palm trees,
maybe 30 of them. Tall thin bristle-up
paint brushes that have caught the end-
of-the-day sun and they glow
like taper candles or hope:
this oasis of thrive rising above
billboards, asphalt, sirens,
rooftops and all the gas pumps at the Circle K.
*
Susan Vespoli is a poet from Phoenix, AZ. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Rattle, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gyroscope Review, and other cool spots. Susan is the author of Blame It on the Serpent (Finishing Line Press), Cactus as Bad Boy (Kelsay Books), and One of Them Was Mine (Kelsay Books). Susan Vespoli – Author, Poet
“Ode…” is such a powerfully-detailed re-creation of memory for me of a loved younger family member, still wandering through his life, who had to be given a choice on the day of his mother’s funeral, after using in my home during shiva and telling us we just didn’t “get it”—get and stay clean, or you cannot be part of family events. You have captured the pain, internalized somewhere but impossible to feel every day.
Breathe. Breathe. Devastating poems and much needed by those of us whose children struggle with addiction. We struggle with them because we love them. But, boy, is it hard. Susan’s poems are real and honest, and her work speaks volumes in just a few lines. Thank you for these.
I freaking love these brave, full-throated poems, Susan. Thank you.
Oh, I am weeping. What Rosemerry says.
Stunning poems. And poems that will no doubt help people who need to know they are not alone.