Three Poems by Dana Henry Martin

No Mental-Health Narrative in My Town

There is no narrative in my town. Just lights
near the bridge that’s been dubbed a suicide
hot spot. Every weekend, nearly, those lights.
Adults. Teens. Nobody who makes the news.
Locals expect the living prophet who speaks
to and for God to fix us here in canyon country,
in cliff country. People on vacation slip while
taking pictures, while hiking and, sometimes,
alongside the person they love or their pet.
People slip. People fall. When I was in a state
of high mania, which meant I thought I might be
the devil, my therapist had me sit in a chair.
She started touching me to release the pain.
Her hands traveled over my neck, across
my shoulders. You’re in the glass house,
she said, the one above the creek, before you
were raped. God can see everything you do.
He sees you now. She wiped my arms
downward as if sloughing death from me.
Let God touch you. Let him wash through you.
Jesus is calling you to him. Don’t resist.
Two days later, I was in the psychiatric ward
at the hospital. They call it B Med.
Until I was admitted, I knew it as the name
a local poet used because he struggled
with depression. B Med. A joke. People
who are manic run in circles like animals
in the zoo or patients in B Med. That’s what
a doctor said during my appointment
when I told him I live with bipolar.
Sometimes there aren’t sirens. Just flowers
and signs that say things in threes, like
It’s not over and We love you and Don’t give up.
The city tears it all down, doesn’t want tourists
to know what happens here, what God either
can’t say or isn’t able to hear. When I stand,
the therapist is crying. This is love, she says.
Can’t you feel it? There’s no narrative
in my town. There’s just whatever this is.

*

The Knave

What if instead of talking in tongues, they’d called it
Voicing what the body needs that can’t be held in language.

What if instead of saying This is proof you love God,
they’d muttered, No matter what they do to us, every little girl

wails when her father dies. Sounds rushed from my mouth
like bees, swarming the nave. The girl of me escaped,

like so many cast-off clones, and stung congregants
whose hands were touching me, an everywhere touch

like his fingers on my back, my shirt pulled up at his orders,
the skin between us shared, mine belonging to him first,

my flesh his flesh, my fingers, my nails. We were nailed
together in life and in death, him in his anthropoid coffin,

me in the one place where I thought I might loosen his hold,
this inverted Pandora’s box of wood and fancy glass. What if

instead of talking about eternity or the trinity, they’d confessed
We knew we knew we’re sorry before drowning me in their despair?

*

I’m a Wake

I’m a wake, funerary. They prop me up
between expensive flowers and
the cheapened dead. I’m open casket,

open book, brittle as paper, lonely
as the printed word. I’m a thesaurus
of blessings and condolences,

pencil skirts and skinny, filtered
cigarettes. I’m pacing and handshakes.
I’m shuffling and stammering.

I’m satin, mahogany, charcuterie boards.
I’m the death announcement and
the estate sale. Oh, what I wouldn’t give

to be the wedding or the graduation,
even the birth with all its blood
and feces, and the bated everlastingness

of the moment before the first breath.
I’m a wake. Let me sit beside you.
There, there. It’s all right. Here I am.

*

Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, CALYX, Cider Press Review, Laurel Review, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, Thimble Literary Magazine, Trampoline, and other journals. Their chapbooks include Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press), and Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books).