hospitalswan

Bungalow Row
This poem is based on a true episode in the life of Elyn Saks, a university professor and author of the memoir
The
Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness
.

There is a concrete street in Miami lined with bungalows and you are walking right in
the center of this street. Spreads of large-lobed leaves droop over the sidewalk and the
slate-slant roofs and the rotted-wood mailboxes. The suns in your eyes and in the
eyes of the homes and they squint against the light at you as you pass by. Youre
wearing white Keds and your bookbag is slapping your beanpole ten-year-old leg that
Mommy and Daddy told you with flattened lips was too skinny. You better eat more of
those scrambled eggs before they notice youre sliding them under the lip of your
single-ply paper plate. It doesnt have to be a lot, just enough so they think youre
eating. They look at you slant-eyed, just to make sure. The bungalows look at you
slant-eyed, just to make sure. Elyn, they say to you with a regretful sigh as you pass
by. Youre an awful, awful person. Why do you even want to keep living? You try to
plug your ears as if you were sailing past the Sirens, but the homes arent outside of
you. They are inside of you. They are the truth: Why bother? Its easier to be dead.
You are fat and ugly. If you were dead no one would have to look at you anymore.
You walk faster, you try to run past, but like I said before, the bungalows are inside of
you, and they know the truth.

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2

Buddhist Cat Kicks the Bucket

For the purposes of this poem, you are a brown tabby cat and a malignant amoeba
has burrowed into your brain. Your name is Luther and youre not sure why you are
having a hard time standing, but you get up from your warm spot on the arm of the
couch. You hit the ground, but not like normal, because your legs dont land under
you. You see sharp splashes of yellow and red flying a few inches from the ground and
you follow them into the kitchen. You slide, slowly, like a generic garden slug on an
acid trip, around the corner of the kitchen cabinet and see the oven door outlined in
neon glow tape, but you dont know what glow tape is because you are a cat so you are
confused instead of aware. There is a semantically confusing roast turkey glistening
inside the oven, but it is warbly-looking because the door is between it and you. Your
eyeballs are pulsing with a dry heat. You stop to upchuck right on the corner of the
mat in front of the sink. Tentatively, you sniff your puke, but then you puke again right
on top of that. You continue, almost on your knees if you had them, as if paying
homage to the Buddha, sliding around the corner to where your bowl of dry food is
kept. But, before you can get there--someone, likely a crow with a beak flat but sharp
like fabric scissors, snatches your left ear and pulls your head downward, drags you in
a circle, and now your ear is stuck to the ground and all you can do is jerk in a circle,
head stuck to the ground, over, and over, around and around, probably forever.

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Beds 121 and 122, Ward 8

I cradle your oasis in the crook of my outstretched arm, in the weltering funnel, in the
soft place between the tendon and artery. Twenty thousand leagues under the
bedrock, I take your hand and choose you. Your eyes are pink under the ledge of the
wholesale Sunday center, of the remarkable red rock rising around us like the foothills
of the underground Catskills.
You should take me back up with you,
she said to me,
lightly, underhanding her song as if playing a softball game with the area between my
ears. You wouldnt understand the leaves, I said. They would scare you. Youve never
seen anything like them before. They are shiny, they are red, they are green,
poisonous, purple, spike-laden, torn, yellow, reminding you of surfaces you never
wanted to touch you, like the floor of a church nursery that hasnt been cleaned in way
too long.
Really, are they like that,
she said.
How can I trust you if Ive never seen them
for myself?
Hold my hand, I said.

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4

REM Dreams
Liver-colored membrane stretched over the rim of a glass full of salt and tequila: your
drink, filtered through, tastes like baby formula. You know what baby formula tastes
like because you licked one drop off of the ring finger, off of his ring finger, off of the
babys nose, off of your collarbone, but not with your tongue, with his, and with the
babys. Later, youve taken enough Benadryl to make a grown man cry, but youre still
awake, sitting with the pillow between your knees and counting the blazing blades of
the ceiling fan as they fury the night into weepy solitude. You apply nail polish, plate
by plate, armor by armor, nail by nail, onto every stripe and stipple and every former
drone-frozen area of sleep, onto every realm of REM that you enter and exit, in your
full force, wearing a gown of silver silk made by moths
whose corkscrew tongues charge about the inside of your mouth,
testing your cheeks for nutrients.

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5

Moth Eats McDonalds

The luna moth appears every night in your dreams. It perches in broad daylight on the
edge of a full glass of lemonade that sits on an open winter windowsill, freezing
everyone in the house to death. This is the moth that keeps the keys to your mind
hidden beneath its talons. It catches salmon, like a bald eagle, in the wild habitats
outside your front door, from the asphalt, from the yellow corrugated lines they laid,
and which you appreciate because they sometimes keep motorists from hitting each
other. Not only does the moth keep the keys to your mind, it keeps your actual car
keys, as well, and youve been hard pressed to continue with everyday tasks when you
are stranded in this winter house with asphalt outside--he even has your library card,
because that is definitely attached to your key fob, strangely, redly, like a sunset.
Unfortunately, hes as fresh out of luck as you are, because he cant do anything with
the keys, nor does he know what keys are, or what you are, because he is a moth and
he is blind and he has no fingers, toes, spine, membranous protuberances, nothing
but a bendy straw that he took from a McDonalds Happy Meal on its way through
someones car window.

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6

Dementia at the End of the World

One of your recurring hallucinations is a zebra-striped poltergeist. You can see
through him, often, but other times he curls up on the top of the piano, like a cat, on
the doily your grandmother crocheted in the last months of 1955, when she was
institutionalized for a disease you cant remember in a town you can no longer name.
Youve named him Barnabas, for good reason, because he reminds you of the depth of
the root systems under the above-ground pool in your childhood backyard in
Barnabas, North Dakota--the ones that created reverse dents in the base of the pool
that you ran your hands over, getting silt under your fingernails, and often didnt want
to touch with your bare feet because they felt too much like the bare bones of the
women of Pompeii after the eruption. When an archaeologist visits your current home,
forty years from now after the inevitable Nuclear Crisis rips the strata from ceiling to
floor and destroys everything within a three hundred mile radius, Barnabas will be
overfed and happy, twining himself listlessly between the destroyed spindles of the
back of a rocking chair that had been left, dust-eaten and underweight, in the
abandoned living room. He will be happy to see them, but he may become a little
possessive because your old photo albums, which he uses for food, will still be in one
piece and he will feel as if the archaeologists are threatening them. Its for science,
theyll say, but youre certain that Barnabas will outlast science. For now, though, you
take a crusty dish towel from the oven door and stuff it into the pocket of your apron,
in case you need to snap the back of his neck as he tries to burrow into your home
videos, your family documents, your Confederate currency, your oak-hole hiding
places, your variegated attic stairs.

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7

Word Salad
Word salad is a psychiatric term that refers to the jumble of disconnected language indicative of psychoses such
as advanced schizophrenia.

Roma tomato, on the vine

Lettuce, spring mix
Baby spinach
Carefully morgue me
Chase Wonder-Woman, scrape
Garlic croutons
Arugula, freshly washed
The weatherman tells Wallace
Which day sprains Mays trench
Red onion, thinly sliced
Cucumber, thinly slapped
Bean sprouts, fresh
Avocado,
Leave the skin on
Hang the skin, soft
Bacon bites
Lapse into
Fractured tastic
Somnambulation of the crowd
Creamy caesar,
Two tablespoons
Cheese, shredded
Spicy buffalo chicken wings
Are not for the salad
Theyre for me
Its the Ides of Salad!
Hail Caesar,
Full of grace
Swept-grass floors of
Artichoke hearts are
With thee.

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8

Hospital Swan
Limp twists of cotton candy drape over the indoor banisters of funeral homes.
Collections of fresh, stenchful hours and the need to urinate reek like the reverb of a
Chinese gong throughout that catastrophic place, taking with them the light, the love,
the furtherance of air. Too often youve come here alone, with no one to huddle your
shoulders against the small of their back and say quiet, unnerving words of Swiss-Miss
comfort to you, to rub undersized marshmallows into your scalp and then rinse them
out again under a long-necked faucet, the hospital swan. This time, though, there is
someone here with you--someone who takes too long to put on pants, who occupies
too much time running double-jointed hitchhikers thumbs over the rubber sides of
shoes that have acted like splash guards for you in the past when youve walked, run,
whocked through puddles and mud-dabbed curbs. In the past when you had puddle
access was the past when you were outside, not inside, sliding your greasy tongue
along the bed-bar beside your head, huffing out hot breath onto the metal so you can
draw shapes in it with your lips like you would a window. They flip you three times a
day so you wont get any bedsores but the sore isnt on your ass its right behind your
ear, behind both of your ears, under your chin, under your nose, in your chest, right
through the pericardial cavity, right through to that aorta you need most.

hospitalswan
9

I Admit You
You were fourteen when I found you in the kitchen, dual-wielding sticks of butter
without the papers on them, flipping your body like a fucking pancake across the tile
and getting jabbed in the side by the handle of the saut pan that was sticking out of
the left side of the sink where it had been left to dry. Maybe its time to go, I said, but
you shook your head and whirled the sticks of butter through the air like throwing
knives and they stuck with perfect precision with their square hand-melted ends to the
wallpaper over the table. My hands shook because I knew this would happen: I folded
up a pair of red-paper-covered twist ties, over and over on themselves until they
looked like weak paperclips, and placed the matchstick bundle in the toaster oven to
heat until they retained their own fire. Place your head here, on my lap, I said to you,
because today is the day and I need to tell you how much you are loved. Whats my
dad like, you said to me and grease from your hair settled into my jeans. Tell me about
him. Instead of your father, I described God: Hes like a refiners fire, I said, warmly,
patiently, lifting your hand to my mouth to suck, lick all the butter off of the webbing
between your fingers. Hes like a mouthful of salt. Hes like an ocean in a tin can. Hes
like a singed spiderweb, smoldering quietly to itself at dusk. Hes like an open orphan
on a fire escape in a brownstone-city, an orphan that has no home to go to and
nothing but a coffee mug full of ash. Hes like a hurricranial shitstorm, a grain of sand
stuck in the corner of your eye, a slap of seaweed you werent expecting, a turtle shell
hollowed out and beaten by the sun. Hes empty. Hes life-ful. Hes fallen. Hes loved
you all this time.

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10

To The Companion Cube, With Love

Doug Rattmann is a character from the Portal series of video games and a schizophrenic who is off his medication.
Rattmann is in love with the inanimate Companion Cube.

I take a good look at her, at her squeeze box, at the light in her distant eyes, at her
daily weight of knowledge: Let me love you, let me pour my melted earwax into your
cracks like an ablution of charity. I belong to you now, my love, my one, my hope, my
all-in-all, my cube of clarity. Tell me where to go, what to do, who to follow, which shoe
to tie first. Tell me how to speak my sayings and melt my headings into cheese, into
five-hour candles, into dark-bunker nights full of starborne dread. Youve carried
within yourself two children and they crawl out from under your skirt: Ignorance and
Want, like the Mother Ginger of wasted aluminum foil. Teach me how to create, I beg,
and look down at where you rest by my atrophied calf. Teach me how to make all
things new. Teach me how to take Newtonian physics and dip a paintbrush into half an
apple full of caramel sauce and slather it onto sliced bread, which I eat off the top of
you. Stone my heart against the glacial orange surface, against the colors of love,
against anything that threatens you. You are my one, my whole, my only. You are
perfect, you are ultimate, you are a finite fling into a rotten sunset. You take what is
least in my sandpaper heart and rub it against your Minos-gold scalp for further
testing, for further longing, for further heat, for further vanishment.

hospitalswan
11

Our Lady of the Charts Hides Under The Desk in Her Psychiatrists Office
In her memoir, Elyn Saks calls herself the Lady of the Charts when she lapses into severe psychotic episodes. This
poem is based on a hypothetical event.

When you dropped me into the ocean, I expected the water to mushroom into the sky
like the aftermath of a hydrogen bomb. Bikini Atoll
1945, clam fallout: shoot the clams out of a cannon, and if youre lucky theyll hit the
circus man whos cracking a whip over the back of a cockroach the size of Bikini Atoll,
1945.
I hit my head on the underside of a desk and the carpet is imprinting

the heels of my hands.

I can kill people with my brain because its so large. Is there
room in the freezer for me? My brain wont fit. I feel it swollen with rain. The rain in
Spain stays mainly on the train, looking out the window at all the cars
and mountains going by. They can lock you up for abuse if you dont let the rain out
every once in awhile.
A train is passing right outside under the window and the room

is shaking.
I think White is scared of me.

While you were asleep, Ive been killing

people at night, like a dark avenger. Youve probably killed a lot of people too. All the
worlds jailers gotta die because they wont take the rain out for air. They want to
arrest me.
Hes going to tell me to take more Navane. He can fuck
off.
Watch out: theres a chance you could get away if you run now. The fire escape is a
good option. They mostly want me, but if you get in the way who knows what could
happen. Youll thank me later. The ice cream truck is waiting
for you to put two grains into the bowl; get three out. That way, we can solve world
hunger.

hospitalswan
12

Vanessa Lovelace and Her Three Alters Undergo A Trauma

Vanessa (35), Wakes Up and Is Confused About What Time It Is
I thought why is it light outside, is it morning? But it wasnt morning it was dusk. Dusk
was just coming on. I sat up from where Id been lying on the kitchen floor but my arm
was sort of stuck to the floor. It was pretty painful when I tried to pull it off, but I did,
and it turned out to be blood, all over my arm. It was all crusted there and all sticky.
The other arm was like that too. No of course Ive fucking never done anything like
this! It wasnt me. I know who it was but it wasnt me. Youve got to believe me. No, I
dont need to go to the hospital. Ill be fine if youd just let me stay here.

Kacey (14), Makes A Kitchen Floor Decision

When its beautiful and blue outside I get angry because it makes me think of twenty
years ago when I was little and it was sunny in the back garden and we had those
plastic swings with those chains that always snagged our t-shirts. Is that good enough
for you? Lets run to 7-11. Lets skip school today. Ive got some rum under the kitchen
sink. You can sit with me if you want. But like, dont if you dont want to, I wont be
lonely without you.

Karl, Age 16, Slashes Vanessas Arms

Its just to make it go away for a little bit. Dont worry. Remember (he slowly dragged
the razor blade across his forearm, the meaty part near the crook of his elbow) how
(he wiped away a little of the stream with his thumb) the edge of your dress felt (he
dug a little harder into his skin) pulling against the backs of your knees? Remember the
cadaverous wedding ring on Dads finger (he skimmed the razor blade across the
linoleum floor) and how his skin bulged around it and kept him from being able to
take it off? He ate too much salt. I remember. Its just to make it go away for a little bit.
Dont cry.

Oliver, Age 10, Vanessas Favorite Alter, Has Never Had an IV

I dont want to be here. Why am I here. Where are my clothes. Why is this thing poking
out of my arm. Its itchy. Will they give me Jell-O like last time. Can you put on Cartoon

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13

Network cause I wanna watch

Teen Titans Go
. Can I go get my Lego. I wanna go home
and get my Lego. Its only gonna take a second. No, I dont want
those,
I want the
Imperial Landing Craft that I JUST GOT. I didnt get to finish it so I put it back in the box
so I wouldnt lose it and now its sitting on the kitchen table. No! I wanna go home and
get it. Can you go get it for me. Why is this thing in my arm. Why cant I take it out. Why
am I here. I want to go home.

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14

Olivers Day Out

I: Toys R Us
Oh no, I dont have a little boy. Ha ha ha. With a sweet, sparkly smile and one gold
tooth. Well, okay for your nephew, then? The red-apron checkout man, name of
Wally, tucked the Lego box carefully into an opaque pink plastic bag, but the box was
too large for the bag, so the corners kept becoming stuck on the edge of the bag. The
man was very patient but he may have snapped the rubber band back on the bundle
of blank receipts a little harshly. Oh no, I dont have brothers or sisters, either. A
sweet, sparkly tooth. One gold
smile. Aight, whos the lucky kid? he said. Guess, she said, and bounced on her toes.
But, Wally, who was certain this was All For Laughs, smiled very customer-service-like
and pushed his glasses up further on his jumbly nose. I dunno, he said. ITS ME, the
woman said. Under the counter there was a reassuring hump of grey chewing gum
and Wally dug his flat thumbnail into it and made a crescent moon he would never
see. One twenty-four eighty-nine, paid in cash,
from a Legend of Zelda wallet.

II: Ink on Main

And your age? Ten. Excuse me?...Date of birth? November fourteen, nineteen
seventy-seven. Seventy-seven? Right, thats what I thought. Thinking that shed
misheard. We require a twenty-four-hour waiting period for customers under the age
of twenty-five, thats why I had to ask. Maggies in the back. Ill get her. Sweet gold
sparkle. A one-tooth
smile. An hour and a half and a box of tissues later, she came out of the tattoo parlor
with a Hylian crest on her bicep. But she had
no one to show when she got home: no Mommy, no Daddy, no brothers, no sisters no
cat no
dog no
guinea pigs,
no self.