What if I find her? What if
I answer to her name? Call her
sandstone, call her holly
bush, call her man made. I call her
something
if not someone.
Call her Brandi Bird.
I slam my wrists against white
walls covered with poems
written by dead women. I am unembarrassed
& profound in girlhood. Here in the psych ward, nurses
only give me sticky tack & printer paper.
Fragments. I
can only read in fragments. I act
crazier than I am
because I am performing for God
&/or the concept
of god in my head. They are two different
things. One is more alive
than the other. A head of thorns,
no eyes or maybe the holes
are eyes. The other is water
rushing into whatever
container will hold it.
Sometimes a container is a girl.
Sometimes a girl looks out
the corner of her eye & sees the water receding.
I act crazy.
That’s what makes me crazy.
You don’t even need to be insane
for them to lock you up my mother once tells me
as we watch Girl, Interrupted on a Friday night. We eat popcorn
by the handful. Wild like we will never eat again. All I am is extreme
attention to salt on my
tongue.
We wipe grease off on our shirts & I throw up
in blue tupperware after bedtime. I hide
the containers in my closet under Spice Girl sticker books
& dirty underwear. I am careful & quiet & I wash the plastic
with soap & water. I don’t flinch
when my mother
puts tomato sauce
in them the next day.
Everything that comes out of me is yellow.
An overpour of bad humor.
Drain me.
I was jaundiced at birth. A baby encased
in salt & amber. My mother
cracked me open with dry hands,
palms rough, her labour long
& forgotten by the end of that day.
She pulled me out & I
was a ray of sunlight
that burnt her eyes.
She punished me for it. Now I punish
myself.
My mother thinks she knows me
but she doesn’t anymore. She isn’t allowed
to visit the ward & I pace
the halls until a nurse yells
at me to go back to bed.
I gain x pounds
of refeeding edema overnight.
It’s water,
the doctors tell me.
Isn’t everything that’s alive?
I overflow
& don’t consider
that I can take other people
with me in my wake. Awake
after the sun sets, a sullen mood
catches the psych ward like the moon
has kissed us all on our sweaty foreheads & walked
away. We all fear abandonment.
I am forced to take seroquel & I stupor. A girl asks
me for a lesson in throwing up. I tell her
it’s not something I would wish
on anyone. Really I just don’t
want competition from another white girl.
Their sadness is prettier than mine.
My cells are greedy as children. They hoard salt, they hoard
attention, they hoard memories.
I miss the child I was but I can’t remember her face. Only a collection
of feathers on the sidewalk, components
of something that could take flight. I make up
a child in my head & shake on my feet
while Degrassi: The Next Generation plays
in the common room. I refuse to sit down.
I stand to watch Emma starve
until a nurse turns off the episode. Emma is suspended
& starves forever. No one
finds out & she never even dies. Just exists
with blonde hair so soft I wish I could touch.
I want to shove my fingers down Emma’s throat.
See if she’s the real thing. I want her
initiation, the loyalty to the
cause.
I dye my hair black.
I want to make
a doll out of what falls out. Play house
or set it on fire with Red Bird matches. When I’m an adult,
I will cut my hair with purple safety scissors
in a fake plastic mirror at another treatment centre. I sweep
up the strands & dump them in the trash with tampons
& floss. There is no ceremony
because I am unworthy. Instead, I pose
for pictures on the Macbook my uncle bought
with money he saved by stealing copper
at night. In every photobooth picture
I am unmoved or immoveable.
On the psych ward, I appear in chunks
of hospital plexiglass, refracted & profane. Call me rounded
edges. Call me rigid. I call for my mother
in my sleep & the whole city collapses
into hallways. The whole
country. I am not a citizen here. I am
not allowed to leave. The nurses
won’t let me forget it.
The psychiatrist says I hold people
emotionally hostage.
The world is my hostage
because I have nowhere else
to go.
I argue with the nurses about Dialectical Behavioural Therapy.
Marsha Linehan would call me willful
or at least the nurses say so. But the world changes face
faster than I do. No half-smile
on its lips.
I split the feeling & every woman is my mother.
Every man is just a man. I want
to be beautiful but I do ugly things. I hide
a salisbury steak from my meal tray. The nurses
search garbage cans
& my pockets. They write in my chart: a girl who shoves meat
in her pockets is a girl
who does not belong in poetry.
I recognize myself in this feeling.
The surprise that I am alive,
a breath
a stutter,
a gasp
so solid I can run my hands all over it.
I can hear its heartbeat,
a gasp
that is alive. It calls out
my name in vapor & I listen.
It’s the only thing I’ll listen to besides the chorus
of my own fear—
a sparrow
that rams the windows
outside my bedroom
until it dies
& no one believes me.
A bird
that fights itself.
I don’t think I know what’s good
for me. I don’t think the nurses do either.
I think do I know that girl? when I rub my sallow
body with vanilla scented lotion.
I change so fast, enumerating, my body
doing what a body does
when it survives. Do I know her?
Call me prairie crocus. Call me bald dandelion. Call me
a nothing flower. I burn
under fluorescent lights.
I don’t know why I do this to myself.
This being abstract & also in my body. A chain
of action I could break at any time but
I choose
not to.
Shiver of lanugo makes me its animal. Evidence
of denial so rocky
it erodes & collapses
into metaphor. Ox hunger versus without
appetite. One monstrous, one passive.
I steal food
from teenagers too depressed
to get up for breakfast.
After one hour post-meal
supervision, I still vomit into trash bags. The girls
who aren’t forced
to eat give me sausage
links because I am their pet dog.
Of course I reject dinner
the exact same day. I perform
anger but at three A.M. I will not stop
myself from stealing chocolate milk
& Biscoff from the hospital kitchenette.
This pageantry of refusal can only last so long.
On Wednesdays, I get weighed, back
always turned away from the scale. I
am a mystery. I growl & bite. I empty. Romanticize the ribs
I can still feel. Garden my bruises, plant
my fists into them. Nurse
my hunger with larger, more prescient hungers. The hunger to live
through this or maybe not. A girl
in the ward compliments my small
wrists. I slam them until
they swell. My body is a means to an end
& the end is just a light
in someone else’s eyes. A light
that means, I see you.
I couldn’t find you
anywhere else.