Tag: suicide

Three Poems by Amit Majmudar

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

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 Mary Lou Buschi

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Fire

            After Marianne Moore

Burned you didn’t it, my mother used to say.
Nowhere near a stove or flame but the accusation
hung there, in the air like refraction waves.
Burned you, you who should have known better.
You who stuffed a short skirt, two panties
in your purse after tracing Kit Fever, not your name
on a frequent flyer ticket. You who barely flew – came
the minute he said so.
No phone, no media, no way to track
the Landcruiser bouncing
over the Grand Tetons. Burned you.
Once. Twice. Shame on you.
Love, was it? Girl alone on a barstool at the Gaslight Saloon.
A dog with three legs curled under the rungs.

*

To the Ninth Grade Girl Crying in the Nurse’s Office During Lunch

You will be invisible in your 50s. Cheese will always be delicious. One day you will drive past a row of trees and name them: Sumac, Walnut, Tulip, and know which ones are invasive. You will become concerned with all things invasive as you stare out the window at a yard too large for your diminishing energy. People will be less interesting, but you will love more of them than you ever thought you could, deeply, finding flaws that enact that velvet kind of love that softens your eyes and warms the curves of your ears. Let–it–go. All of it. Not much matters. Not the stop sign you hit during your driving test. Not the Great Lash you lifted in middle school, or the date you ditched at Lucky Strike. Not the way you organize your closet by color, bookshelves by imagined dinner parties. It all gets left behind for someone to sort. It may be an unassuming couple that throws what you held dear into a rented dumpster. Dear Ninth Grade Girl, you will try to step off this world many times. Many times, I hope you fail.

*

Mary Lou Buschi (she/her) is the author of 3 chapbooks and 3 full length poetry collections. Her 3rd book, BLUE PHYSICS was published in February 2024. (Lily Poetry Review books). PADDOCK, her second book was also published by (LPR). Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Ploughshares, Glacier, Willow Springs, On the Seawall, among many others. Mary Lou is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and holds an MS in Urban Education from Mercy University. Currently, she is a special education teacher working with students on the spectrum in the Bronx.