Featured Poet -Jamie Gannon

Featured Poet - Jamie Gannon

The following poems (and such) were written and edited from the 4th floor of the community hospital. The 4th floor is both locked and secure–it is suicide watch.



MANTRA


It’s not the first I’ve struggled with

My mental health

Or the second

Or the tenth

Or the twentieth 


I have built-up certain muscles and 

calluses both cognitively and intuitively 

because I am still alive.


I need to trust my muscle memory. These 

are things I have done before.


SOME DAYS


Sometimes 

I am unwell mentally 

And I guess a lot 

Because it is really hard to tell–

I know everyone is unwell 


sometimes


But they haven’t had their 

shoelaces taken away

Or lived behind a locked door

On a floor with an armed guard

And the door to your room is 

cellophane and

the shower curtain imagined is

dangled from earbuds confiscated


It’s hard to tell if you’re ok

But you’ve been locked up 

with such gentle recurrence


It is just so difficult 

To know

When hurting yourself 

Is happening 


The gentle pull of self

by bootstraps taken

Defeat awash in loss


You kind of think

You’re just a suicide 


But only some days


EAST/WEST


He was not a pretty man

But there was once a kindness 

In his eyes


In life 

You get locked up 

For the hate you apply 

To yourself 


Some do it with drug 

Some do it with drink

Some do it with blood


But we all are locked up 

In a pretty tight hole

With multiple check-ins

And locked doors—

Real, serious locked doors


Irv and I argued about which way

The large glass-paned 

hospital window 

was facing:


I said West

Irv said East


I said West 

He said East


I said West 

Irv said East


And at the end of the day,

He was coming off a long drunk 

And I was only once 

again suicidal


The window was facing West


But we both wore the same gowns…


The argument lasted an hour or two.


Or three.


Hospital windows don’t reveal much-- 

other than you are in a hospital


Again


But I will remember him for 

the rest of my life.

Maybe next time 

Irv and I will be 

On a different floor 

And a different window

Will reveal a different sun


STONES


I don’t write poems 

about you

Or the corners of 

the campus

Or the hospital grounds

Or the oft deserted paths

That sometimes end in rooms

with festooned softness on the walls


It took so many years

to hide me

Awash in a single tear 


Spent in labyrinthine 

basement stalls

Where the crying happened


Eight steps to the door

Twelve steps up the stairs

Weaving step by step

In inevitable solemnity


I trusted the 

wrong person 

In the wrong room

On the wrong night

Under the wrong sky

Under the wrong moon


Twenty years more

trying to make it right—

But it wasn’t half-right

It was just wrong


My pockets are full 

of tokens 

that take me from

euphoria to despair 

and back again 

with timetable precision 


Your stones weigh so much

Your stones weigh me down


THIMBLES AND THREADS


Sometimes

we survive by

thimbles and threads

Where an act of kindness or 

the gentleness of touch

Can separate here from there


I broke my heart to

find my body

and

I broke my body to

find my heart


And

sometimes

You die of wounds

A day

A month

A year

Several

Then

More


Died of wounds

On a dark night

forever ago

But always now


PEBBLES 


The pebbles we find

In between the then and now

The pebbles we hold 


Both caressed and worn


Become our talisman 

Against a past 

We cannot forgive

And a tomorrow 

We cannot find


We collect them in both

Desperation and pain


These pebbles are 

What we have

These pebbles are 

What we are


Forged in defiance

Of destruction 

And madness

And horror

And shame


We will collect these pebbles

And cherish them

And hold them

Like erstwhile lovers

Waiting for the first 

glimmer of dawn 


(And some will say

it’s just a pebble 


What if it’s a really 

just a baby stone


foundations are 

built from 


faith

saliva

sweat

and 

bone


You say I’m broken

What if I am just 

shorn in two


With a little faith

Let’s see what 

pebbles can do)


TATTERS


soon an echo past

Eyes lie 

Lips tremble


Don’t heed the cacophony 

Don’t listen to the hue and cry

Of horns and whistles and screams 


Feel


Feel yourself in tatters

Feel yourself in full

A part of you is trying to live 


Shards reflect early sunlight

Collect yourself in the dawn 

Until the inexorable shatter

Piece by piece

Block by block

Until you succumb at dusk

In an alley

Alone in your fragments


Shards reflect early sunlight

Collect yourself in the dawn 

A part of you is trying to live


CODA (FRAGMENTS)


Last night 

A friend ended my life

In two sentences

In a sentence

In a fragment


I wish I was more

But I am less


I am not willing 

to be sad forever

Not this sad

Not forever 

Sometimes 

sadness 

wins


Sadness more

Sadness less


(And when a tear

Slid down my face

It did so 

In silence

And shame)

A VERY SHORT STORY



I was not fantastically healthy in the summer of 2019. I was a year and a half distanced from my suicide attempt and nearly three years from a thing that shall not be named. Sadly, I lacked necessary language to understand my body and her signals, but I was lucky in some ways–I was a full-time instructor. I was wildly popular by my own very negative estimations of self with a full salary and almost ubiquitous control over my syllabus.


I decided I would choose things at the end of July. I had no interest in being unfair to students with impending suicide thoughts dancing in my head–and the College needed my booklist by July’s end. I would choose one path or the other–but I would stay on that path. Once I committed to the semester (or not), I was in or out wholeheartedly. I cannot say I did much more than flip a coin (I was much much less healthy then—issues all over). But I had developed a very interesting syllabus in the prior few semesters–a course based nearly entirely on one volume of poetry I had happened upon, Against Forgetting. The premise was simple: how to use poetry to confront personal, physical, and political trauma. Poetry as defiance.


The semester began on a Tuesday, September 3rd. It was the first course for fifteen, sixteen first years. I introduced myself as Professor Gannon–more specifically, I said, “My name is Professor Gannon. I am brilliantly unstable.” The course went swimmingly. The most invigorating section of my life–students were enthralled, engaged, and just, well, off the charts. Years on, the majority of that class have received, or are completing, PhDs in various fields. I have stayed in contact with about half the class. I would be an advisor to many of them in the years following. 


During the semester, students compiled a list and made a collage of my tangents, post-scripts, and stream of consciousness ramblings (which I still have). Of course, no one knew that when I introduced myself as “brilliantly unstable” I was being a bit more literal than they understood. I had spent late July and all of August in a mental health facility only being released on a late Sunday evening from the ever rigid suicide watch–just 36 hours or so before classes started. 


I have never shared any of this.


This is a long journey as to why I am writing this. Against Forgetting is at the forefront of my thoughts–poetry as necessary; poetry as defiance to trauma. It may heal; it may not. But poetry gives sound and fury to things untoward, unspoken, unfathomable, and quite simply, wrong. Poetry as punk. 


ABOUT JAMIE

Jamie is a poet and itinerant professor of written things in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Jamie's latest body of poetry, Poems From the 4th Floor, is a reflection of her vision to use poetry as a means to confront trauma: personal, physical, and political. The following poems were born from that central tenet. Some of her poems would fit comfortably in the confessional vein of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Author is currently finishing her dissertation and dreaming of the Italian countryside. A featured poet in the Poetry for Mental Health series, her poetry has appeared in the published anthology, Mental Health, Volume II and Featured Artists, Volume V. Author has always been published in The Inflectionist Review. In addition, she has read her poetry as part of the Review’s Reading Series 17.

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