Zach’s Book Launch— By Joanna Acevedo
Artwork by Susan Cohen
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There is a force that breaks the body, I have read about it in a book somewhere; soon it becomes obvious that I can’t discern reality from what I have made up in my head. It happens suddenly. I don’t sleep anymore, my head is full of this insomniac light. The doctors have a word for this and it sits thick and dry on my tongue, the unsalted cracker of chronic mental illness. I don’t feel awake; I just feel like I’m floating. Each day is a repetition of the last. I’m moving through existence like a balloon. B and I talk about lip filler, but when D gets off work, instead of speaking about my own despair, we speak instead of my guilt. She says I can’t feel this way, which is another way of saying I don’t blame you for how fucked up things have become. It’s been a long time coming but this is what it is. My father asks if I can water the plant in his studio. On the subway there is a smell but I can’t smell it. It’s possible that it is not real. This is a question. Questions, you see, are the problem. A label like ADHD or anxiety might feel like it explains how you’ve always felt, but all of you out there need to know the other side of the coin. I feel sorry for these people in theory, I really do, but I do not have empathy for those of you who want to take on a diagnosis without knowing what this is like. I can’t, angel of elbow, angel of bright, angel of terrible, monster of terrible; music and terrible, a small big music and several terrible thousand tremendous. I just spent all week with you, my father points out. There’s no smell. He is confident in this, me less so. I try not to think about the fact that he could be right and I find myself becoming hysterical. Is it possible that reality has fractured, a split that I was neither aware of nor in control over. If you don’t sleep for just a few days, really don’t sleep, you can hallucinate. I’ve watched documentaries about that. Obsessing is one of my favorite things to do. It’s an art, like everything else, inevitable, even when X tells me get home safe I still can’t look away from the man who walks by at three in the morning, my tears are made of a substance I can’t name, he is profusely bleeding, as if this is normal behavior, and I was told that it was desirable, the by-product is pain, I try to name it but the words turn into glue in my mouth and forgetting becomes a new habit, a kind of trade or vocation. I’m sorry but I am doing my fucking best. The doctor tells me to sleep, keep in touch. I want to be afraid more than I am but I can’t muster the concern. What do I know and what am I not sure of? I can’t confirm anything and the truth splits, then splits again. Nerves burrow into my stomach. The man on the subway who made eye contact. Was he real? When I spoke to him he had no idea what I was talking about. I can still remember the confusion that slid over his face like the shutting of a door. Soon it’s all launched into question, all of my reactions and experiences—see, questions. Suddenly I can’t stop remembering. I listen to the same songs on repeat but I always do that. I am hearing my name called in the music I listen to so I have to listen to music with no lyrics, even if the song ends; soup, glove, milk, chalk, raise the dead, finish the thought, blot everything out, the stars, blot everything; stop saying broken. They won’t be changing the meds again. He didn’t warn me that this could happen. There’s no smell, this is what everyone says, but I don’t believe it, there must be. Even when I sleep I dream I can’t sleep and I’m standing there looking down at them, the night pouring from my hands. I feel shame arc like a blade through my solar plexus. I have to stop reading novels, which saddens me and makes my work as an editor difficult, angel of headlights, angel of soap, angel of telephone, hurry red telephone; I am trying to feel something other than fear or anger or grief. How do you live with this? It’s surreal the way paintings can be, or a movie you watch after too much Bacardi and orange juice, underage and drinking in someone’s bedroom, too many of you crammed onto the bed passing around the bottle. I have a transient, slow-moving kind of focus. Across the street I look into the open windows, unexceptional as a rain gauge, thick and joyless, a soup of ghosts, my memory numbed with tequila and grief. You can’t just leave it that way, can you? This permanently empty room? I wave my hands around a lot and don’t sleep.
This is what I know:
I am twenty-seven years old. I am psychotic again. It is summer.
*Note: This poem contains source material from Richard Siken’s poem, “Several Tremendous.”
Joanna Acevedo is a teaching artist, writer and critic from New York City. She is the author of two books and two chapbooks, and her work has been seen across the web and in print, including in Free State Review, The Rumpus, Bending Genres and Hunger Mountain, among others. Nominated for a Pushcart in 2021, she is Associate Editor at Frontier Poetry, Craft Editor at Palette Poetry, and received her MFA in Fiction from New York University, in addition to holding degrees from Bard College and The New School. Read more about her and her work at https://www.joannaacevedo.net/.