POSTS

Spectrums of Madness

social worker <- -> psychiatric patient   
 
I am a social worker, a psychiatric survivor, and current consumer. My clients do not know this. They do not know that every morning and night I take a handful of pills to make sure I can meet the demands of society and capitalism. The world has no place for me when I’m not well. When I’m hypomanic, I will take days off work so that I can write, fuck, and spend money. When I’m depressed, I will take days off work to lay motionless in bed for hours on end. At its worst, I end up admitting myself to a psychiatric hospital. My finely tuned cocktail of meds allows me to approach each day with the clarity and patience I might not have if I swing too far in either direction. 
  
What does it mean, then, for me to exist as a social worker, a future therapist, and a patient simultaneously? In Exploring Identities of Psychiatric Survivor Therapists: beyond Us and Them, contributor Kristina Yates writes that therapists “are only as good as the work they have done on themselves.” I have done the work and I am still doing the work to be the best James I can be. I engage in therapy twice a week with two of the best therapists I could ever dream of.  I believe that my history as a psychiatric survivor will allow for a more authentic empathy. To be clear, this does not necessarily mean that I will self-disclose my past to all clients. 
  
I self-disclosed recently to a client who has a bipolar II diagnosis—just like me. She lamented about how she will never be able to do the two things she most wanted: hold down a job or maintain relationships. I remember panicking for a second before I said, “hey, listen, I have the same diagnosis. I have a job. I have meaningful relationships. It’s possible.” What ensued was a powerful dialogue about how the world labels us as “sick,” or “crazy,” and so we go around calling ourselves exactly that when in fact we are so much more. Yates goes onto say that an alternative narrative exists within the psychiatric survivor moment; a narrative about the “possibility of wellness or a good life for many people who have been given psychiatric diagnoses.” Through strategic self-disclosure, I demonstrated to this client that it is indeed possible to be “well” and bipolar. 
  
Even still, occupying the space of psychiatric survivor and patient feels precarious to me at times. I worry: what will happen when I, inevitably, have another bipolar episode? How will I be able to maintain a private practice full of clients with potentially high needs when my own needs are quite high as well? How can I help other people when there are days when I can barely help myself? These are all questions that other survivor/therapists have in common—it is important for me to remember that my past does not dictate my future.  

self harm as self-destruction <- ->  self-harm as survival 
  
I have an extensive history of self-harming behavior, going back almost 14 years. It is a hard habit to kick when it is sometimes the only source of comfort and release during a distressing time. I had a really unprofessional, unhelpful, and cruel therapist growing up as a teenager. When I shared with her that I was cutting, she would invite my mother into the room and make me show her. She threatened to institutionalize me—a threat that was very real given I had already one inpatient stay under my belt before the age of sixteen. I came across a journal entry from December 2nd, 2010 in which I write that if I wasn’t allowed to cut, then I would not eat. I had already been starving myself at that point. Like cutting, it felt good. My therapist told me I was “refusing treatment,” but looking back on it now, I do not know what treatment she was even offering me. My cutting, to her, was significant in terms of the risk of suicide, and yet, she did nothing to ease my suffering.
  
“You’re mutilating yourself,” she would tell me, but I begged to differ. For me and individuals like Clare Shaw, a contributor to Searching for a Rose Garden: Challenging Psychiatry, Fostering Mad Studies, self-injurious behavior is done more often than not as a means of survival and is a conscious decision to stay alive: “it’s a uniquely powerful decision to make…there is immense hope and strength, and that in engaging with death we also engage with life: what it means to be alive; what we want from our lives.” If you had asked me why I was cutting back in 2010 I would only have been able to articulate that it simply felt good. Now I see that cutting was a powerful coping skill; a way of “preserving and affirming life.” Cutting, of course, preserved me by keeping me alive during period of suffering. More than that, though, cutting affirmed me by being a physical representation of my internal distress. 
  
In her efforts to prevent me from cutting, that therapist of mine only further put a wedge between us. She didn’t see me. She didn’t hear me. She tried to remove my agency and stop me from exerting the only control I had over my life at that time. She simply did not understand that cutting was not a means of destruction, but rather, survival. I rarely cut these days, although it happens sometimes. What has helped me the most is my network of supports. I have two therapists who make me feel safe, cared for and heard, and a psychiatrist who has spent more time listening than prescribing. We have all put in the work to make sure I stay alive.

Katie <- ->  James 
  
          Katie lives inside of me and she doesn’t even have to pay rent. Katie is James; James is Katie. I am a transgender man and Katie was the short version of my birth name. Katie exists, even in this moment in time, as a teenage girl. She’s not an ordinary teenage girl though—she’s crazy. She hurts herself compulsively and worries—if not scares—others in her life with her frequent extreme emotional states. It is Katie who comes to visit when I, James, am lying peacefully in bed at night mere moments from sleep. She creeps into my psyche and pokes and tears at all of my sore spots until I desperately need a release from the pain caused by trauma. The thing about Katie, though, is that she doesn’t mean to hurt me. She’s usually trying to lead me to something deeper within myself. 
          In my past musings on Katie, I have asserted that she had to die so that James could live. Upon further reflection I have realized that Katie and James can coexist. I am okay with sharing this space with her. My Gestalt therapist pointed out that it appeared that the battle between the Katie and James was like two waves competing for who got to be the ocean. Indeed, on many days, it does feel like a battle. Katie is traumatized, timid, and not able to appropriately self-regulate. James is at peace, thriving and has deep insight into his moods. There are days where Katie wins, and that’s okay; I simply set the bar lower on those days. It is important to note that Katie, also, cultivated a life worth living for James. It is Katie who pursued psychiatry, therapy, and social work. It is Katie who pursued the social and medical transition into James. 
          My therapist recently posed the theory: what if Katie was never actually suicidal? “It’s plausible,” I told him. He went on: what if Katie was simply responding to the external stimuli around her? That landed for me. Katie wasn’t “too much.” Everyone else was simply not enough. So no, perhaps Katie was never actually suicidal. Perhaps she was simply after something far richer than what was offered around her.  

All of My Selves 
 
I have spent years agonizing over whether Katie and James can share a body, and I have spent nearly as long wondering if my tendency for self-harm totally discredits my work as a social worker. What if I could simply, just be, and relish in the plurality of myself, my body, and my work? I am reminded of my undergraduate thesis on Orlando, by Virginia Woolf. Orlando, the central character, exists across centuries, and survives heartbreak, war, and a fantastical gender transition. Above all else, Orlando takes interest in the fact that one does not have to live as the same self for the entirety of one’s life. 
  
It is true that after 22 years of living as Katie, I was utterly sick of her. After beginning my transition in 2016, I did everything I could to banish her from my mind and body. 2020, for me, has been about making my peace with Katie. I looked to Orlando for advice. Orlando’s life spans four long centuries and by the 17th century, Orlando is “sick to death of this particular self. [She] want[s] another.” The use of “another,” does not mean death of the old self, but rather a coexisting of identities. Every day I work to become the best version of myself. I realize, now, that my best self is equal parts Katie and James. 
  
Katie might not be how I present anymore, but she is still inside of me. I want to be the social worker and therapist that Katie needed when she was younger. I want to show up for other queer and trans folks, for the bipolar kids and teens, and show them that it is possible to live a full life and do meaningful work. I will come to these folks as James, with Katie’s scars on his arms, but I will come ready and willing to fight for them.  

James Macaulay McManus is queer/neurodivergent/trans man/social worker who hopes to open a private therapy practice.

 

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THE ANGELS OF LOSS ANGELES

This is how you do it!

You strip the scales from your skin, the sunlight shines in, everything returns to its origin, wild from the womb, before the human domestication process, having a body…that’s the problem! and I have one so I stare straight into the sun so sublime it eats my mind fell out of an envelope addressed to who? you?  what does blue mean to you when your feeling… blue sky blue sky envelops my mind floating on a river of light entities glistening singing softly…I remember who I am again…I remember those sweet talking  sounds of my soul…I remember growing old…I remember being free again…I remember those sun seeing beams made of me…I remember being born…I remember who I am again…I remember those sweet talking sounds of my soul…I remember growing old…I remember being free again…I remember those sun seeing beams made of me…I remember baby… a message from god maybe? a melody for me? my spiritual destiny? The quest in me came to collapsed on the concrete sobbing at the source in secret  tears the fraud of my face, this is the part where a brain splits and the sun spits sweet on my cheek like a  creek in a dream, and through the crack comes a calling…

Selections from WHY SETTLE FOR ANYTHING LESS THAN TOTAL SPIRITUAL LIBERATION OF ALL THE BEINGS!!!

[...] [A]nd then I saw the present sharp in perspective, it cuts my guts, it leaks in a  cup and I drink
          It was the edge of experience it was the end of the lie my eye that we are not living in a  dying city on a dying planet. It makes me sad. It makes me so sad to see it. It makes me mad and me was  overcome by madness so me was evicted from the room me was rentin, and estranged from my family and unemployed so moved into the library of my college and slept on friends floors and eventually  stayed up for days and days in a daze reading and reading and reading made me a maze and Felix Guattari made me weep with love for madness maybe me Felix and fell asleep in my car and didn’t mind  besides was on a mystical mission to save the world save the world so could not be burdened by housing  or boss and stayed up for days and days in a daze and got kicked out of the market for a body zigging  and zagging in a maze and a head hit with hammer for sciences donkey brains oozing spilling sewage  

[...] 

They were  coming for me. Any minute now. imprisoned in a hospital. its all love. They don’t understand. Why are  you here breathing this air? Its all love. They don’t understand and so a hand on a gun, a gesture in my  body. It shakes. California could have been an earthquake, but it isn’t. So madness my muse why must  me messianic consciousness doing itself to me setting me free but what for? And The Empire screams why the FUCK are you here breathing this air? Sir I plead, I think they call it existentialism. I exist so I am  the enemy? Why are They trying to destroy me? Its my destiny blacked out backseat banging on the  cage blurry fragments of dreams struggling to scream I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING

And I could have been an aborted fetus but I was born instead, thrown from a womb, another body  belonging to this Evil Empire that never ends, and every body has to belong somewhere, so there I was,  where most of us are not welcome, shackled to a stretcher, pissing into a catheter, staring at the ceiling,  a white wall, that means nothing, but these blinding lights that desecrate my vision. When in walks a  white lab coat carrying a clipboard, it says here that it believes it was personally selected by the sun for a  magical mission. Check for magical thinking. Check for grandiose delusions. Hello there, we are going to  make you into a submissive member of society, how’s that sound? ….feeling shy today….well if it wants  to be a part of society it masters its animal with cruelty and it love dogs on a leash and it hallows out a  whole in its head and it lives there and it thinks it is there because it thinks it is a space and not a force  and so it is and it sits still or it doesn’t and it drinks the doctors potion and it sits still and it orders its  house and it calls it spring cleaning because spring is pleasant and it wants order to be pleasant too and  it struggles to turn its rhythms into elevator music and it tells itself it loves elevator music and eventually  it does and it always cooks itself by following their recipes precisely and it tastes itself and it tastes  disgusting and it is so ashamed of its failure but it never ever unwraps zion’s rotting bacon becoming a  beam of god unless it wants to be circled by The Empires army six guns and voices demanding to know  why it exists, and we wouldn’t want that would we? No, please, I can obey if I try. I promise. I can curl in  a crevice and hide in the whole of the horror. Please don’t murder me. Please don’t murder me. Good,  obedience is a virtue, it obeys in exchange for a gentle violence that it calls love and then it matures and  takes responsibility for forming itself and it trains a tongue and a lung to form a corporations public  relations department and it says GOD BLESS AMERICA!!! blessed are the Americans who can become  the apocalypse anytime but can’t stop dreaming about domesticity in this city that ate up their brains  and imagination a fascist dog barks I AM THE EMPEROR you brain diseased criminal its your nature  that’s the enemy is stabbing me with a needle now I fear nature and I feel nothing  

Selections from THE EARTH LOVES YOU AND ITS YOUR HOME!!!  

 Precious planet 
 where I sleep  
 seed of my dreams  
 temple of trees  

 talk to me sweetly  
 blessedly your child  
 welcome me wild  
 as the wind  

 swept away my soul  
 and gave me a new one  
 sunlight on my skin  
 its easy to begin  

 learning to be alive again  
 when you wake up  
 sleeping on the beach  
 weeping at the sunrise 
 
 you could die  
 one thousand times  
 for a love  
 they don’t understand  
  
 [...]

 the universe  
 is spilling  
 when I weep  
 for tujunga canyon 
 where
 love
 comes
 to die
 where
 the
 military  
 made the river dry  
 where a creek  

 could be a crack  
 comes a calling  
 my consciousness  
 washed in exstasy
  
 by our madness  
 my muse  
 for the messianic age  
 before the genocide 
 
 and I
 love you
 so much
 that I
 don’t
 want to
 leave
 you
 behind  
 so I’m drinking
  
 malt liquor  
 in this candy coated  
 day dream  
 to calcify my soul so  

 four loko  
 green apple  
 of my eyes  
 sobbing at the sky 
 
 we are all going to die  
 I cry 
 I’m going home  
 I’m going home  

 dew drops  
 on the moon  
 love fell  
 out of the room  

 so numb numb dizzy  
 waking
 up with
 the
 shakes
 can you
 save me  
 from becoming an earthquake 
 so them humans  
 don’t murder me  
 was
 just
 trying
 to
 make
 anoth
 er
 earth  

 [...]
   
 all I am  
 is these negations  
 make nations  

 of our earth  
 where
 the
 temple
 of trees
 still
 speaks to
 me  
 sweetly, says  
 I got put in my place  
 for the aesthetic  
 of a sterile city  
 and you  

 got put
 in your
 place
 too in a
 box on
 a box  
 with no windows  
 that you pay for  

 and you pay  
 and you pay  
 and you pay for  
 do you not believe? 

 in the beauty  
 of your nature  
 made of magic  
 could be the kindest cosmos…  

contact at [email protected]

 

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box full of yearbook outtakes and things that survived the fire

stare at the photo of sun on dog in squares of light        sun on light with dog in sun all over in
squares of light on a page of pictures in the archive that remembers me         always turning        dog
morning sneaking through the window of the basement where I hide what I refuse to eat in a box
of pictures         the best way to loop time        capture and destroy time         ease time away like lit
birthday candles reducing themselves to wax throwing shadow on the white rug the blue chair
and the charcoal stain behind There are too many COLORS in this house THAT’S why it had to
burn        give me a photo like a benediction          the plural swing of all our hauntings passing over
the substitute house like a fleet of men like a parcel of men like MOM there’s a flock of MEN
passing over the house        no one took any pictures of that        but look here’s one where I’m in 
the parking lot with pink hair        one outside the 1998 cooper union national youth poetry slam           
one at the public pool where I never get high enough to stay casual        the air prodding the edges of my 
skin        or        here        sitting alone in the bitter kitchen        downstairs by the stacked boxes with the 
custody papers I won’t see until later 
and in this one I am laughing.                             swanned out on the couch ready for the damage 
and in this one I am dancing        skinny limbs tossed around        and in this one I am staring
down calculating a dog’s lifespan on my toes the years between then and now divided in squares
of light on the carpet in lit squares  

griffin epstein is a non-binary white settler from NYC (Lenape land) working in education and community-engaged research in Toronto (Dish with One Spoon/Treaty 13). They have been featured in Glad Day’s Emerging Writers Series, and their poetry has appeared in Grain Magazine, The Maynard and Plenitude, among others. griffin is the author of so we may be fed, forthcoming from the Frog Hollow Press disability chapbook series. They play music in SPOILS, make games with shrunken studios, and develop multimedia work with poet Shannon Quinn and artist bryan depuy.

 

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Blue jay lessons and spells

          I slouch low in the Adirondacks Dad built for the porch, hidden behind the juniper bushes, smoking tobacco and herbs. Mara’s thinning ponytail sweeps her shoulders, dull in the morning sun. She speed-walks up and down the block, where her parents can see out their window. Blocks gossip, but, rounding the cul-de-sac, I could’ve guessed she moved home for treatment. I wonder which program—the one that did nothing for me? The one to avoid like the plague? Her frenetic gait echoes in my legs, a memory of ache. My clothes are a bit roomy these days, but more than that, I’m sallow. Wilted as the dry, bleached remains of my curls. Does Mara know I moved home, too, another neighbor kid flunking adulthood? If I walked past, could she read synoptic history in my hair?
          My thoughts are homemade fireworks, bright and erratic, a panic of loud. Anyone who looks at me knows what I ate this morning. I don’t want to be seen. 

—

          Kneeling at the altar of my bedroom floor, nights pass in a fever of symbols. First, graphite and india ink, then watercolors, pastels. I string my childhood bunkbed with clearance fairy lights. Half of them don’t light up anymore and I’m too tall to sit upright in my bed. 
          Eyes prick my skin with their static. It feels the same as it did as a child, when people watched through my mirror. I locked myself in the bathroom, alone, pressing the tip of my finger to glass. A kid at school said if your reflection touches your finger, one side’s a window and someone could watch. Half a centimeter remained between me and myself. No one watched from within the walls, so they must’ve used cameras or magic.
          I made a silly face in the mirror and though: Have fun watching me brush my teeth.
          I picked my nose at them for good measure. I’m not afraid of you.
          Now, I let the moon in, blinds open well after dark. I draw a self-portrait with antlers wrapped in trumpet vines. When Mom comes in to say goodnight, she winds around art supplies on the floor to close the blinds with a twist.
          “Someone could see right in,” she says.
          I don’t say: They can go fuck themselves. I want to make art with the moon. I crack them open, just a little, when she leaves. 

—

          My days soar on winds separate from weather. I’m punctuated. Sudden drops impale, spikes of terror and dread. I vibrate like a tuning fork. With my parents, I try to measure my words, rapids through a sieve. I try not to think the word hospital, in case someone hears, in case thoughts bring things to be. 
          My ears ring constantly. I track the sound through the house. The high pitches get louder near plugged-in electronics, even if they’re turned off, but my bedroom is loudest of all. At first, I think I’m just hearing berms of my bodily energy built up over decades. Then, I notice the singing. It oscillates on my skin, teeny-tiny multitudes, like carbonated sound. 
          I have a set of three wooden bowls placed here and there around my room, holding sundry pretty things; trinkets I’ve picked up from the ground, old friendship bracelets, small fossils. The bowl on the bookshelf holds two handfuls of beads. Chips of quartz varieties: smoky, rose, aventurine. They sing—every stone, singing. It’s beautiful. Loud. Sonic energy lifts the hair on my arms as I approach. I pour some into my hands. A few drop to the carpet beside my bare feet. 
          They sizzle. They actually sizzle. They bubble in my hand. Eyes wide, I laugh, remembering Pop Rocks that turned your tongue green.
          It’s some dark hour. Cats and parents sleep. I secret the beads into a thin tulle bag and hide them in my sister’s old bedroom, under forgotten sweatshirts in the dresser that matches my own. When I crawl into bed, the ringing isn’t so loud as it was. Even so, my body still vibrates.  

—

          I’m exhausted, wide-awake in bed, fairy lights on and eyes closed. In my mind, I’m in the garage, in the Honda, the garage door closing behind me. I park and turn off the car, get out, and two men accost me. They snuck inside when I wasn’t looking. One wields a hunting rifle. They came for my mom and for me.
          How might I protect us?
          In the world we agree on, my mother serves a church as a solo pastor. Her congregation works with Reconciling in Christ, a process training them to welcome, invite, and be safer for LGBT people. The men in my mind want to punish her for it. For birthing me, too.
          The scene plays out in fractal, over and over with minor evolutions. I work through each variation: What if I scream? Fight? Jump back in the car and punch it through the closed garage door? With each run, I learn, refining my choices until it feels right, like I’ve learned something new. Like we’re safe. But no matter how I changes I make, I can’t change the premise. I’m always closing the garage behind my parked car before I get out. 
          In the world we agree on, I park in the drive way, not the garage. It doesn’t make sense. 

—

          My dad built a bird feeder shaped like a trough for the deck. Squirrels love it. It’s fastened to the white banister, framed by the family room’s bay window. Birds fly in to feast from our cottonwood trees and the woods beyond the swamp. Once, I saw chickadees, gold finches, cardinals, robins all eating together at once. Then, two blue jays dive-bombed the banister, expansive, territorial. They chased the smaller birds away, but ate nothing from the trough. 
          A squirrel scampers across the banister with seed-heavy cheeks beyond my mom’s heaving shoulders. She sits in the light of the window in sweatpants, Kleenex beside her. She neglects the crossword in her lap; pen doodles fill up the margins. For three days, Mom stays home from work, sits on the couch, watching reruns, and cries. 

—

          I can’t remember his car. Dad emailed pictures to block and cul-de-sac so the neighbors can keep an eye out. I’m no longer allowed to park in the driveway; from now on, Mom and I both shut the garage door behind us before we get out of the car and Dad parks where I parked outside. 
          I can’t remember his name, but Mom says he becomes someone else when he’s drunk. She asked if she could share that I was queer with her congregations if it became professionally relevant. I gave her permission and she preached about me, an example among other stories. Most of the poisonous rage he spat into her voicemail was for powerful women leading the church. But he mentioned me—he remembered.
          It’s dark out when I pull into the garage. I sit in the driver’s seat, car off, doors locked against the creaking silence of an engine cooling down. Bare bulbs buzz above me. Threat echoes in the emptiness. If this is too much like my imaginings, it’s too unlike them, too. In my head, I could maneuver. I could choose, reap consequence, learn. Here, alone beneath the rafters full of old sleds and cross-country skis, there’s nothing to outsmart. Only words I never heard, deleted after statements were made and evidence collected. 
          Tonight, somewhere else, a man drinks until transforms into another man, or he doesn’t. I find myself violently safe. 
          A fear-shaped space moved home with me, a door held ajar by my thoughts. Maybe that’s how his words slipped into our lives. Or maybe my third eye needs glasses. 

—

          My parents installed the hot tub years ago, but I use it now more than ever. I turn on the basement fireplace before I go, so it’s warm when I return. The hot tub steams up through the screens that contain it, billows caught in the floodlights that illuminate the foreground cottonwoods, middling swamp grass, the dark backdrop of woods. Anyone looking in would see nothing. Not the robe I hang on a hook by the door. Not the nothing I wear, slipping into the water.
          I imagine the man rounding the east or west corner, stomping downhill along the house to break into the basement. It doesn’t feel real. There, though, at the edge where the woods meets the swamp, that place is real. He’d stand there in boots and jeans, hunting rifle in hand, squinting to see past the lights. 
          I know he’s not there. I don’t know that at all. I flip the bird at his negative space. 
          I’m not scared of you.
          A red light blinks in the darkness. I don’t know what from. My limbs boil limp as noodles. Back inside, I stretch by fire. After a while, I turn on some music and turn off all but firelight. I dance with invisible ribbons and orbs, pulsing colors, pink, indigo, teal. Tangible, I gather and move them with gestures and breath. My body unwinds. They touch me, pull at my sternum. A sun spins. Luminous mountains climb and rise to the beat, small as stalagmites.
          Are my eyes open? Does he watch through the window?
          I climb onto the love seat and lean over its back to press my finger against window glass. It’s double-paned. My reflection touches me and it doesn’t. 

—

          Mom goes back to work. Her community rallies after the threats, stronger than ever before. Dad’s at work, too; so is most of the block, but I can still feel someone watching. Backyard, the deck, slunk low behind juniper, someone touches my skin with their gaze. I check for Mara walking laps before I trot down the driveway. Maybe I speed-walk a little, too, just to pass faster, less chance to be seen. 
          Down where this street meets the next, I turn onto the path to the park. There’s a perpetual groove in its pavement where the swamp reclaims the land with flood every spring. I cross it and stop at the edge of the woods. The breath of the trees presses against me, an envelope. I step through still, gum air.
          My shoes rest, obscured by the base of a tree. I leave the pavement for a cold dirt path into the small wood. It’s thinner, now. Dad’s been on a crusade against an invasion of buckthorn. Their bodies line the edge of the path. I light an herby cigarette. Mullein fluffs up the lung clouds like vapor or steam. Blue lotus brightens the colors. The lavender scorches, but I love how it tastes.
          I walk barefoot on the thin fallen trunks, toes gripping lichened bark. My balance is shit, but the soles of my feet feel alive on tree, loam, and stone. The path leads me to the white rock doming up front the ground. I hop onto its turtle shell, smudge it with toe prints. The, down and around, past a buckthorn cemetery, down to the swamp across from my backyard. 
          I stand where I imagined him standing. The man whose name I don’t know, whose car I forgot. I look for boot prints in the mud. If the swamp knows this man, it won’t tell me. 

—

          There’s a shooting at Pulse Nightclub. I wake up to the news. Mom and Dad are already gone, off to the first Pride fest of her church’s small city, where she and other clergy are to lead a collaborative worship. The man lives in this city. I can’t leave the house.
          It’s easy to picture her out in the sun, green grass and a hill, some oak trees for shade, and Mom, in alb and stole. It’s easy to picture her smile, the glow of her freckled face whenever she’s in her element, the professional version of the joy she feels when all her babies are home. It’s easy to picture a burst of bullet, blood, my dad weeping, trying to save her. Maybe he’ll get shot, too. I hover, above and behind myself. I want to turn off June.
          Five years ago, my mom asked if she could preach about me. I’d spent the year watching posters melt off cement classroom walls, overmedicated and lost. Mom made it clear that I could say “no.” I said “yes.” Even then, still an angst-riddled teen, I knew this wasn’t about me. It was about the hundreds of people who listened to her speak from the pulpit, who struggled, or loved someone who did. People cried during her sermon. They poured into her office, seeking resources and solace. So many parents, no longer alone in their fear for their child. 
          Church changed that day. People looked at me different. Despite the broad, discrete strokes Mom painted with, strangers knew an intimacy of me, unreciprocated. They knew why I fled service to hide in Mom’s office, but I didn’t know them.
          Once, my mom told me, “I don’t know anyone else who’s helped so many people they’ve never met.”
          These words are not a pat on the back; they’re affirmation of choice. Sitting on the window seat overlooking the swamp and the woods, where the blue jays nest, I know I’d make the same choices again. Mom would, too. Madness or queerness, it doesn’t matter. We’d both do it over again.
          And I’m afraid. 
          I’m so afraid. 
          I’ve never known such fear.
          I get up from the window seat and pace the route I used to walk in middle school, gabbing with friends on the phone. The cats snooze away on the back of a couch and I give each a grief-wet kiss. Mom asked us to play Jupiter: Bringer of Jollity from The Planets at her funeral. I turn it on. I can’t pace anymore. I can’t hide or walk away from the clawing in my ribs. I know my mother will die. She won’t be murdered standing tall, but crouched to greet someone’s child, eyes crinkled up by her smile. Dad would take a bullet for her if he could. A well would fill overflowing with all this pride, this grief, this love. In a heap on the hardwood floor, I’m crying and crying and crying.
  
          Mom comes home sun-kissed and sunny in lime green t-shirt and shorts.
          Face dry, I ask her, “How did it go?”
          “Perfect,” she says, breathless, as though she’d jogged the whole way home. “Fantastic turnout. We couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful day.”
          She hugs me. She smells like grass. The garage door stays open all day, breeze dusting across cement floor. 

—

          I walk barefoot through the woods again. The sun shimmers down between petals of green and everything smells like its growing. I’m joyful, thoughts like a babbling brook, like staring at the sun. Perched on the bright breach of pale boulder in the middle of the path, something magnetic tugs at my breastbone. Giddy, I giggle out loud to myself, close my eyes, and follow the pulling. Flickering small-lights and long strands of color lead me east, away from the rock. Pale blues overlay on the path beyond my sun-bloody lids. Feet quest, stumble, and prick. I turn. There’s a fork in the path, both running south to the swamp.
          I peek, slit-eyed. My vision says left. The tugging says right. I try left, then double back when my heart starts pounding, heavy. Still peeking, I walk down the right fork to find three feathers, blue and striped. I find another. Then, the whole bird, a blue jay, dead in the brush, as though he’d fallen right out of the sky. There’s cacophony inside me, frightened, exuberant. I dither a moment, then I race home to grab a plastic bag.
          Mom asks from the kitchen, “What are you up to?”
          “I found a dead bird. I’m want to bring it home to bury in the garden.”
          She eyes me, uncertain. I feel flush on my cheeks, but I grin, grab the bag, and run off. I try not to think the word hospital. Back in the woods, I gather every bit of the bird I can find. It seems almost sacrilege to carry his body in plastic, but it won’t be for long.
          I carry him home, sun high and hot. Neighbors work in their yards. We wave hello. I pop into the open garage to grab gloves and a trowel. My feet squelch through a soggy patch of lawn on my way down the hill to the garden by the swamp. Dad gathers fallen branches and rakes while Mom lays out fresh mulch. They’re sweating and scratched, breathing hard from their labors. They’re happy. 
          Both shoot me questioning looks, but they leave me to my toils. There, where anyone could see, I dig a hole in the dirt. I keep two feathers, the rest of the bird laid to rest. Once covered, I choose five river rocks and press them in a design above his body. Small branches are broken. I shut my eyes and incant something silent and pagan, homemade. 
          It’s dark, somehow. When did it get dark? I walk the yard’s periphery and find myself alone. Lights on, I can see through the windows, the outside looking in. Dad’s at the kitchen sink, head bent over busy hands. Mom sits at her favorite spot on the couch with her crossword, some procedural on the TV.
          At the northernmost edge of the yard, where grass meets the swamp, I press a stick into soft turf, one feather stuck upright, like a flag. East, then south, halfway up the hill, a stick pressed into the ground. South to the curb, then west, I find the southernmost point and press in a stick. West, then north, halfway down the hill, the final stick, stuck in the ground. North again, I walk until the circle’s complete, to seal in the magic.
          I hold the final blue jay feather in my hand. Overhead, first, I feel it fly, then I see it with closed eyes. It’s beautiful, loud, a little uncouth, fiercely protecting its home. 

E B Joy lives in a little cottage near a river and some lakes. They graduated from Hamline University with a BFA in Creative Writing in 2020, where they contributed to Runestone Literary Journal Vol. 6 as a student editor in 2019 and were awarded the Ridgeway Fellowship for their Summer Collaborative Undergraduate Research, Summer of 2020. Forever Falling Sideways by the Icarus Project published their work in 2013 under a different name. Joy is an active member of the Hearing Voices Network’s local chapter and a Certified Personal Medicine Coach.

 

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Too/Not

Too much is what they call you
when your shape is unfamiliar,
when your neurons grow at a different speed,
when you speak in tongues too lilting
for them to follow the rhythm.
Sometimes we miss each other,
our movements and thoughts parallel.
Not enough because they can’t track
what they can’t sense, so we look
like we’re doing nothing
when we’re doing everything,
every motion, every moment a choice
to continue wading through
a current meant for different bodies,
minds that flow the other direction.

K.S.Y. Varnam is a queer, neurodivergent, and disabled Toronto-based writer, artist, and editor, as well as the founder of The Quilliad Press. They share a bedroom with two mischievious parrots, Riff Raff and Wobbles, both of whom regularly feature in their poetry. Much of their work also focuses on neurodivergency, disability, queerness, and feminist themes. Their work has been published in several journals, including Hamilton Arts & Letters, Plenitude, Metatron, The Quarterday Review, Breath and Shadow, CRUSH, and Transition Magazine. 

 

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ECT

Mad girl, I love you!

Twoey Gray is an aroace zinester, arts educator, and sweet-tooth poet-ish laaady. Her work has appeared live at the Women of the World Poetry Slam and College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational, and in video on CBC Arts and Slamfind. She is the author of Electrodaughter, a chapbook on her experience receiving electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Find her at twoeygray.com.

 

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Lonely Diagnosis

And if my allowing myself to be brought here confuses you, if you think for one minute that I am singing one song and dancing to another, then you have not been following along. Stick to the facts. That’s what I have to tell everybody. They are clear and crisp and lay cold and unblinking on the snow banks that lined the drive here. I press my nose to the glass and nod at each, and as they pass they slip under the car and up into the backseat and down my stomach. I feel them still; they have not melted, despite the heat in this room. There are hundreds of them, and they tell the story of what has happened to me, what was done to me in the beginning, what must be stopped. I will open my mouth round and wide, and each fact will come slipping out, only to attach itself to the blank wall that faces our chairs; there they will remain hard and sharp and be beautiful and powerful and all-knowing. And all I will have to do is point and say, here, here is all that you need to know. Here is where my doctor refuses to look, and here is what my mother does not accept. But you can see it, I know you can, and you can understand what the truth is. You can stick to the facts. You will recognize the danger I am in, and order that I be removed outside the city limits, far from the grey grip of the pill-pushing death angels. Gone, wiped off their video screens, the metal disc in my brain growing weaker and weaker with every moment. Come spring, it will be mere dust, and one morning I will stand up and sneeze, and it will all be gone. 

Jocelyn Patten lives and writes in Ottawa.  

 

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