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.
