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

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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