Three Poems by Dana Henry Martin

Window Strike at Highlands Behavioral Health

While we were talking about death, bullet-like,
a crow struck the floor-to-ceiling window and landed
on his back two stories below. I checked on him
during a patio break. He was still alive. I placed him
in a shrub. He grabbed a branch with his talons
but flipped upside down when I let his body go.
He was too cold, his nictitating membranes
clouding his eyes as he lay on the shrub’s moat
of dank mulch. I rolled him onto his stomach
so he could breathe, but he flipped on his back
again and again. Is he dead, the patients asked,
most of them young men who were certain
everything was an omen. They lived from sign
to sign, deciphering what things really meant,
the secrets speaking all around them. I think
he’s dying, I said. There’s nothing we can do.
At our next patio break, the crow was gone.
What does that mean, the patients asked me.
I wanted to believe what I told them. The crow
was just stunned and needed time to fly away.
But I think a staff member went around the side
of the building and tossed the bird, alive or dead,
into a bag and then into the trash, a truth I could
barely confront, my mind lashed by sadness
and fear. Maybe that bird was a sign, an omen.
Maybe we were all the bird and the staff member
was the entire staff and the bag was our cure
and the trashcan was the hospital and we were
either alive or dead, all us patients and maybe
the nurses and techs, too. It was impossible
to confront that they were in our world like that
or that we were in their world like this, that we
were each other’s worlds. Our faces in their eyes,
theirs in ours appear. Bird gone to glass. Bird gone
to ground. Bird gone to trash. Patient gone to knees.
Patient gone to floor. Patient gone to needle. How
could I say that? I had to say, The crow survived.

*

Lost

The town I live in became a fun-house
version of itself when I slipped into psychosis
two summers ago. Or was it fall? Seasons turned
inside out, and time, and place. People I knew
looked like each other. The men like my father.
The women like my mother. I walked down streets
in the dark waiting for the LDS version of God
to take me or send me to perdition with his sons.
His call. He did neither. Every road ended in a field
or a turnabout, rows of cows or dark houses.
I was missing the signs, the ones I needed to see
in this rural puzzle game of piety. I called the police.
Maybe they’d book me for not being wanted, even
by God. Surely, that was a capital offense. They said
to go home, where I didn’t belong. I needed to be
forgiven once and for all or punished for eternity
for being his daughter. For being of him. For being his.
Heavenly father, on behalf of my father, wipe me off
this map, wrap me in your gown, lift me from this bed
and burn me until I’m clean or extinguish me before
I manage to burn down this whole damn town.

*

Bonnet About a Demurring Theme, I Mean

sonnet about a recurring dream, no world
outside this restroom with its busted squalls and
leashing skinks, I mean rusted stalls and leaking
sinks, a mingled blight nickering of love, I mean
single light flickering above. Unkind
prayers aren’t even falls, I mean sometimes there aren’t
even stalls, just one wrong stash in the drawer, I mean
one long gash in the floor. Or the best groom has no
whore. I mean the restroom has no door. There’s
never any wrath issued, I mean there’s
never any bath tissue, and I want to
clot over the stench, I mean squat over the
trench, but my eggs are breaking, I mean my legs are
shaking like I’m awake, I mean like I am a wake.

*

Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, SWWIM, Trampoline, and other literary journals. Martin’s poetry collections include the chapbooks No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press).