Tag: recovery

How We Rebuild by Christopher Barry

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

How We Rebuild

After his hip surgery
I asked my friend about meditation
because we have the same history
when it comes to pharmaceuticals
and I wondered how honest
he was with the doctor about his past
and how was he managing
with his wife keeping track of the pills
because as we inhabit these bodies
not designed to last as long as they do
how does sitting and noticing our breathing
help when bone rubs on bone where cartilage
used to be and tendon and ligament
fail to stretch around all that atrophy.

And my friend, who rebuilt one day at a time his life
only to wake one day with a titanium hip
that will outlast his body
and a prescription that reads like a note
from an old love that his wife
holds in her purse, understands
I am not asking a theoretical question
of suffering. Some days I sit
and follow my breath while my thoughts
snake through the wreckage of my past.
Some days no amount of detachment
and gently coming back to my breathing
is enough. I can manage the slow move
towards the surgeon’s knife
but what is strong enough to handle
the recovery that follows?

*

Christopher Barry is a teacher living in New Hampshire. His most recent work has appeared or will appear in “Feral,” “Scavengers,” “Poet’s Row,” and “Sport Literate,” and “Sardine Can Collective,” among other publications. Follow him on Instagram @mrbarrywrites

Rebirth by Ellen Austin-Li

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

Rebirth

It wasn’t an immediate awakening
after I had my first child, but a gradual

dawning, the way the night’s black sky lightens
to silver before hints of the sun appear

above the horizon, sooner than the streaks of gold
rising. There was the morning I woke

to a silent house, an empty crib. The gone baby,
removed by my husband for one night

not enough to pull me out of the chaos
of blackout drinking. The void of not knowing

what I had said, what I had done, how
the house could have burned down

with my son in it. The light entered
with my child’s return, and I added one

sober day to another, until I could remember
the sunrise and my need to see it.

*

Ellen Austin-Li’s debut poetry collection, Incidental Pollen—a 2023 Trio Award finalist and 2024 Wisconsin Poetry Series semi-finalist—is the runner-up to the 2023 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize from Madville Publishing. Finishing Line Press published her chapbooks Firefly and Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic. Ellen is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee whose work appears in many places, including SWIMM, Salamander, The Maine Review, Lily Poetry Review, and ONE ART. Ellen holds an MFA in Poetry from the Solstice program. She lives in Cincinnati, OH, where she hosts Poetry Night at Sitwell’s. More info @ https://ellenaustinli.me/

Two Poems by Jean Voneman Mikhail

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Breath

Tent of my kid pitched in the backyard,
blown over, collapsing in on himself.
Tent stake through his heart.

I’ve left him to the rain, again,
grass blades stuck to his back,
huffing a billowy paper bag of breath.

A baggie of cut triangular sandwiches.
A baggie of blow. A baggie of weed.
Holy trinity of school lunches.

I have fed him to live to build
fingers for sandwiches and fiddle.
I have opened his Oreo black eyes

when they wouldn’t open.
I’ve unscrewed the lids,
and looked into the frosted eye whites

and scraped him of sweetness.
I fear I’ve made a mess of him.

I gave him sippy cups with blow holes.
Juice boxes with snorting straws.
Straws to stick up a turtle’s nose.

Once, he cared about
all the animals.

He cried for the neighbor’s kitten dead
in winter, fed on snowy moonlit milk.

He wanted the world to be kinder.

Is there any way to save him, now,
from chasing that washed up baggie
turning inside out in the waves

long ago down a stretch of beach,
a baggie filled with ocean water,
safety locked, zipped full of air?
His breath.

* 

LGLG

Dear God, with your capital G,
I see what you’re up to,
counting bodies down in Portsmouth,

Ohio, of all places to leave him.
God, listen to me, you can’t
have him all to yourself in an alley.

Your wrought iron doors,
windowless eyes bricked in,
having ceased watching over him,
haven’t you? How

would I ever know? Quietly,
cable wires cross this city,
trains rock themselves
to sleep at the end of the line.

But where is he, where is my son?

If he must die, if he must die,
how with dignity, how—
with forgiveness, how without shame?
How do I keep him from death
if death is what he chooses?

Should I lie down with him
and die, too, on the crescent moon
sidewalk of what was to be
our first total solar eclipse,

For my son, for my son’s life,
I’d give just about anything
except what I can no longer give.
No shelter. No food. No more.

God, no.

What kind of insanity is this?
Let go, let God. LGLG.
Give me a break.
I’ve given enough.

*

Jean Voneman Mikhail lives in Athens, Ohio, where she first came to study for a Masters in Creative Writing. Many years and a few kids later, she now writes more than ever. She has published in Sheila Na Gig Online, The Northern Appalachian Review, Pudding Magazine and other poetry journals and anthologies.

Two Poems by Susan Vespoli

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

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

Choosing the Sorrow by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

~ ONE ART ~ 19 Comments

Choosing the Sorrow

In my heart today, a river of love for you—
sparkling, clear, easy to wade in.
Some may not understand
why I sometimes reach down
to pick up a smooth stone of sorrow,
not because I have stumbled on it,
but because I want to know its weight again.
I search beneath the glossy currents,
and always I find what I seek.
There are thousands of such stones,
enough to cover the whole river bed.
Every one of them precious.
Every one of them, a memory
of how it was to love you when you were alive.
Stone of you waking in your crib, pointing to light.
Stone of you doing tricks on your bike.
Stone of hiking up cliffs. Stone of undone dishes.
Stone of your eyes. Stone of long fingers.
Stone of you whistling across the room.
The river of love is no less powerful
for all this sorrow. When I am still,
often I choose to go wading here.
I notice how beautiful they are, all these stones,
worn as they are by the currents of love.
I notice how the current never stops.

*

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is poet laureate for Evermore. She co-hosts the Emerging Form podcast. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her new collection is All the Honey. One-word mantra: Adjust.