Tag: mental illness

Inheritance by Laura Denny

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Inheritance

Sometimes my father
was a slapdash carnival,
mercurial, dangerous,
and still my house of mirrors.

He was the thing built up
and then torn down,
reinventing himself
time after time.

He thought I would be
the second coming.
But when I was born a girl
my mother finally realized
he needed to be hospitalized.

I kept my father’s blanket
folded in a closet
and rarely spoke of it.
Would it soothe me
to put my apocalypse
of the heart into words?

Not an ending
but an unveiling
of something that was always
waiting inside me, the thing
I was most afraid of
because it runs in the dark hollows
of my blood where I keep my secrets.
The thing that made me crumble
as it unfolded over my son.

*

Laura Denny is a retired kindergarten teacher who lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. She is a docent for Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. She loves to hike and forest bathe in the Redwoods near her home. Her poetry has appeared in Pictura Journal, Sunlight Press, Remington Review, Last Leaves Magazine, Orchards Review, Amethyst Review, and Macrame Literary Journal.

Three Poems by Amit Majmudar

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Harpsichords

Hollowed-out shoulderblade
of a musical pterodactyl,

strung with strings of gut.

The fingers touch
like blind twins in adjacent gestational sacs
learning the face of their captivity.

You, with your flight of ideas—
isn’t language, for you,
a ten-ton tungsten harpsichord?

Angelically ungainly, swung
absurdly through closing subway doors,

or propped beside your place at Starbucks
in the way of anybody
trying to get to the restroom,

or angled into a back seat
to block the rear view mirror
of anyone
who’s ever given you a ride….

how can they know how dear it is to you?

You’ve drawn its every gut string out yourself,
clenched teeth, blue pills, hours of hissing—

your navel still bleeds sometimes.

What do the doctors know of verbal labor,
of gulped-down decibels of childbirth?

Every so often,
you leap off a cliff
with harpsichords
taped to your flapping arms.

Metaphors, like the long bones, so hollow
gravity can whistle through them.

You were born a pterodactyl—
you, with your winged words.

These gut strings, heart strings, living
wires that electrocute you
feel alive to no one else.

This world is an observation unit,
and you’re on the hospital roof—

IV pole your prophet’s staff,
your gown of glory
open at the back.

*

Not To Exceed 5 Doses in 24 Hours

Shaking out a chewable pink pill for my daughter’s fever,
I thought again about the other girl
whose stepdad took her to the basement
and tied a rope around her neck and tied
the other end around a crossbeam.
He entered standing up, his hands behind his back.
She had to cling to him because she knew
if she let go she would fall and
hang herself. It turned him on, how she clung to him.
She was ten when it happened. She was fourteen
when I did her intake interview
on my Child and Adolescent Psych rotation.
She had emptied a childproof bottle of pills
over the hollow in herself
at the fairy tale stroke of midnight.
This was a yearly thing for her.
“One of these times,” she said, “I’ll get it right. These pills,
they’re supposed to kill
pain, aren’t they? One of these times they’ll kill
what they’re supposed to kill.”

*

Twin-Twin Transfusion

My brother redrew the lines on his palm
with an X-acto knife.
Shaved his right eyebrow, shaved
lightning zigzags into his buzzcut temples.
Pierced the nipples that would give
blood but not milk.
Headphones jackhammered the pavement
of his birth body
to reveal an underground city
where he was secretly a native.
I think about him sometimes, I wonder
about the underground scene.
We never hear from him.
He moved there at seventeen
tossing fifty Valium
into the tollbooth coin basket
as he gunned his body home.
He went to war with his birth.
I know how I must seem to you
with my side part and my three kids,
but I had a twin brother whose bunk
lay empty every couple months
while he slept with gravewrapped forearms
in the child and adolescent psych unit downtown.
Excuse my double knotted shoelaces
and my model-minority smile,
but my temples ache when I remember him.
My palm lines tingle and turn to ants
carrying all the sweetness out of my life.
I hold the dripping razor
to my eyebrow,
daring him to grip my wrist and guide it.

*

Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025), and the poetry collection Things my Grandmother Said (Knopf, 2026). More information at www.amitmajmudar.com

Two Poems by Shannon Frost Greenstein

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments
Your Hands
When you play music for me, I watch
the nimble joints of your practiced fingers
curl over the faded piano keys
like diaphanous wings unfolding in the heat of sunrise
and I feel something I did not feel before.
You play a chord and I see
a web developer, fabricating a brand-new reality
from a Lego pile of ones and zeroes; and
a surgeon, hands holding mastery
over the cellular processes of life itself; and
God, mixing the soundtrack of the cosmos
like a DJ high on bass and MDMA.
When you play music for me, your wrists
dance like Baryshnikov between sharps and flats and perfect fifths,
percussion as choreography as language as song,
and as your entire body resonates with music you yourself have scripted
I remember what it was like to fall in love with you.
You write me a song and I reflect
on tempo and poetry and heartbeat and joy, the privilege of immortality
captured in something beautiful and heretofore unknown –
art that exists where art previously did not exist,
a Big Bang birthing matter from the seeds of nothing at all –
and everything because I was lucky enough to meet a musician and my soulmate
one summer night at a bar.
When you play music for me, I forget all about how
I used to yearn for the touch of tragic artists
who sow the sort of lust and mystery
I would later reap as heartbreak
and instead picture the silk of your palms against the landscape of my naked back
as you soothe my restless body when I am unable to sleep.
You compose and I watch your fingertips
sculpting notes into paths and layers and staircases and peaks,
thousands of hours of work culminating in this very moment and,
in an act of primal validation orchestrated by Darwin himself,
a rush of neurotransmitters through my blood affirms my choice
that this is indeed the mate to father my young.
When you play music for me, I cannot look away
from your hands.
*
She Gave Me Her Last Diet Coke
I blame my mother, of course,
for conceiving
and birthing
my own addiction to Diet Coke.
They say eating disorders are a family disease;
they say an eating disorder is like a gun.
The pistol is the genetic predisposition
to seek out control when things feel uncontrollable;
the bullet is a culture that venerates thin
and praises the anesthetic of becoming less.
The trigger is unbearable anxiety or distress,
so is it any wonder that childhood trauma leads to eating disorders?
Screwed by both nature and nurture,
my mother’s eating disorder was planted in my genome
before I even had a say.
Ballet and abuse and mental illness and assault
germinated my Anorexia by the time I was eight.
And the rest of my life has been spent
grappling with the one firearm
I never wanted to fire.
They say recovery from an eating disorder can take over a decade;
they say maybe it isn’t even possible to recover at all.
After three decades of punishing myself
for requiring the fuel of food
I still don’t know if I will ever be free
from the voices that inform me I am worthless
deep within the bowels of my broken brain.
For years I have worked, and cried,
and done my best to get where I am today.
But my Diet Coke addiction remains a vestigial artifact
of the times it would take two twenty-ounce bottles
just to quench my hunger.
I eventually forgave my mother
for loading the gun that became my cross to bear;
after a lifetime of estrangement,
she was finally my friend
by the time she passed last November.
And I know she loved me
because the last time I saw her before she died
she gave me her last Diet Coke.
*
Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) resides in Philadelphia with her family and cats. She is the author of “Only as Sick as Your Secrets: Notes from Residential Eating Disorder Treatment,” a forthcoming memoir with Watertower Hill Press, “The Wendigo of Wall Street,” a novelette with Emerge Literary Press, and “Pray for Us Sinners,” a collection of short fiction from Alien Buddha Press. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee, with work in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Follow her at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre. Insta: @zarathustra_speaks