My empty cart is hungry for possession. I collect random lies and ingredients I ll never use. 49 48 IMAGE BY LAURA MARQUES
OUTPATIENT REHAB AFTER WORK UNTIL THE INSURANCE RUNS OUT BY MARY WOLFF White walls, chipped polish on chewed fingernails, a voice saying my name, only I can t answer. Why do you think you drink so much? Why do you take drugs? This same question over and over like I m supposed to have the answers. I thought I came here for the answer. White walls with Kmart pictures of a bear by a river, my mouth tastes like someone else s without bourbon in it, the words tumbling inside aren t mine. I don t know how to be this awake, this present, how to navigate this life when all I can feel is metal scraping bone under my skin. I stay silent. She writes something on her notepad. Probably uncooperative or some such term, a new opening in the case of me. She repeats the question. She tells me if I don t want to be here, I can leave. We both know if I leave, I ll die. If not the next time, then the next or the next or the next. The thing about living on borrowed time is that you never know when you ll run out. Why do you drink? Why do you do drugs? The question hangs in the air between us with three other strangers sitting at a table with paper name tags on their shirts. There s an ex-military guy named Chip, a stay-at-home soccer mom named Jessica, an 18-year-old kid hooked on heroin. I think I m better because at least I picked something soft like bourbon and pills. That softness is a mirage to keep me there while it splits through damaged tissue, and a mouth that used to be mine begs for a mercy that no longer exists. But hey, at least I m not doing heroin, I say as I down another bottle on my lunch break in the parking lot. She tells us, All of you will relapse and most of you will die. I wonder why she even wants this shitty job. The kid next to me says I can actually buy heroin online and it s so easy the first time that needle breaks the skin, and it s all you ll ever want for the rest of your miserable fucking life. Jessica says she doesn t believe she s an addict. I mean, she s white and upper class so this must be some sort of mistake, right? She smells of red wine and overpriced perfume. The heroin addict s eyes glaze into the back of his head. Chip plays the role of the silent man all night. His white-knuckle grip on the chair arm tells me he either relapsed last night or he will tonight. I go to the bathroom so I can breathe without trying to disappear. I wonder how much online heroin costs and how hard it is to sterilize a needle. I wonder how much I would need to inject to disappear for good this time. Why do you drink? Why do you take drugs? 51 50
Grocery Store Truth Apple Picking Outside Chicago The world began while I slept. The day didn t set an alarm clock. It simply began. The world did not start off with a cigarette dangling between chapped lips. It did not cut coupons only to leave them at home. The day never sets an alarm clock because that would be silly. It always knows when to begin. I push my empty cart through aisles stocked with colorful boxes telling lies to me. Maybe if I had those damn coupons I might know which one to choose. I can feel the flutter of eyes from the housewives as they judge my movements. My empty cart is hungry for possession. I collect random lies and ingredients I ll never use. I tried to make him dinner the night he left me for good, but I burned the fish, head and all. The unmoving eye of that fish on my counter judged me. I drank away the flutters in my throat. I only came to the store for vodka. Not even the good kind. I tried to make him dinner the night he left me for good, but I burned the fish, head and all. The world did not start off with a cigarette dangling between chapped lips. I only came to the store for vodka. Not even the good kind. Today I found out that the world began while I slept. The wounds have always weighed more than the fruit. When I was nine years old I went to an apple orchard I can still feel my small hands reaching through leaves and the motion of a forceful twist to pull the apple from the branch Even then I looked at the mark on the branch where the fruit separated before admiring the apple The wounds have always weighed more than the fruit Images like sunlight before it fades for the day The color of her sweater burnt orange in the car now red in the sun The air smells sweet in a way that is sticky and I m convinced it isn t real She picks an apple off a tree without looking at the wound on the branch and throws it at her husband from a row away in the orchard Her laughter rises between rows of trees bearing fruit as she drops more apples in her bucket and I watch a few spill out onto the grass 53 52
She isn t my mother and he isn t my father But for this moment I pretend Pretend I can be this little girl standing in an orchard on a fall day noticing how sunlight makes apples glisten against the green of the grass and the changing color of a sweater of a woman who could be my mother There isn t anything magical about this woman but she let me play with an old guitar that was missing a string and she told me my hair was pretty and to finish my breakfast She gave me her daughter s old cowboy boots when my real mother brought me to Chicago in November in flip flops This woman wasn t anything special but she was more and girls like me search for more their whole lives She didn t remind me I was small or an inconvenience with so much emphasis that the C sounds became S sounds like a snake slipping across my feet She could be any woman and I would still pretend she was my mother This is what let-down little girls do until they learn it s too late for that and lay it down somewhere like a few forgotten apples under a tree I talk to other people, strangers even, because damn it, I can t talk to you any more. What We Don t Know About How to Heal I talk to other people, strangers even, because damn it, I can t talk to you any more. I can t even write this right now without my hand fighting it. My fingers curl into a stone, a fist, white knuckle bone, anything other than open. Please, I say to myself again, be anything but an open palm held out to someone who has let go. People say when something has healed, it won t hurt to think about it. But they never tell you how long that takes. I don t know why I can t get past this. I tell myself the same things over and over. Why are you making a big deal about nothing? You were barely even friends most of the time. Maybe you just like feeling sad and he gives you a reason. Why are you thinking about it? It was all in your head. Then I realize this is part of the healing, too. 55 54
There are so many things I don t say out loud. I don t tell you I accidentally dream about you all the time, not in a sexual way, but in a way much worse. I have dreams about the tremble of your hand in the mornings, the way your voice lilted when telling me about winning an award for being the best reader when you were in the second grade, the way you crawled into the hospital bed and held your father before he died, the shape of one grown man grieving another, all the memories that feel like a betrayal to your privacy because I still remember them, all the ways we are more alike than we are different, all the places I carry you inside me to keep you safe the only way I can, the only way I m allowed. I don t tell you I dream about you, but I do, and I will until I stop. I wake up angry at myself for remembering again when I was trying to forget. In dreams, sometimes you re a little boy and I know it s you even though I didn t know you then, and the sunlight makes your eyes a different color than they are now. In other dreams, we argue on a sidewalk somewhere because I asked you to order a Coke instead of a rum and Coke, and your eyes look the same as the little boy in the last dream, like this is all in the same universe, the universe of you, and it s just one long story I ve written by memory. Even in the good dreams, it always ends in danger, a flood, a fire, an accident, the daily disasters you create because you don t know how to stop. In the morning, I remember the distance between us keeps growing for a reason and the dreams are preparing me, teaching me how to let go some day instead of how to make a fist. The pieces of my life that never fit inside of me rising to the surface all around us. My Failed Attempts at Gator Baiting Myself There is no body of water on this marsh of a State that doesn t have one or two swimming around in it. Even when they are an unseen presence, not just the possibility but the expectation of their rough skin and claws waits beneath the stillness of the surface. We know what is at the bottom of every lake like a secret that won t stay buried. There was a retention pond behind my ex-boyfriend s house, a flat top of a house with an air-conditioning unit dripping a puddle under the bedroom window, turning dirt to mud. Two nights after we broke up, I drove out to the house, unsure of what to say. The new For Rent sign in the yard felt like muddy water forming around my legs, dull teeth tearing at my tired skin. I tasted the dirty water of the pond as it crawled into my mouth and I stepped inside its blanket of darkness. The gentle splash next to me was more than my own imagination, but he was missing a crucial part. He had no tail. He floated in front of me; both of us knowing I would be immune to his attempt to death roll me into smaller pieces. I watched his black eye shine in the moonlight, barely visible against the water, and saw the pieces of my life that never fit inside of me rising to the surface all around us. 57 56
MARY WOLFF I don t know for sure when I became a writer. I think becoming a writer is something that happens gradually over time rather than in one particular moment. I started writing poems when I was 13, and that was it for me. Poetry is the easiest way I know of to make sense of the world around me. I wrote this collection of poems as a response to emotions I was still in the middle of processing. These poems in particular were a way for me to process some feelings of shame and anger I was unknowingly holding onto with both hands. I drew from my own experiences, like the chaos of active addiction, the fearful freefall through subsequent rehab for said addiction, and the struggle to make sense of everything left in that wake. If you are a writer, go for it. Don t hold back when it hurts or it s hard. In my experience, life is going to hurt either way, so you might as well get a few good poems or stories out of the deal. A writer has to be willing to say the hard things no one else wants to confront. I m not saying you need to seek out a fight for the sake of a fight or write poems with the aim of hurting your parents/spouse/friends, because that isn t what poetry should be about. Tell a story and make it count as a way to reach a better understanding of the situation for yourself, and then aim to move the reader in some way. I hope these poems do just that for both of us. I write under the name M Wolff Writer on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram because people call me Mary or Maggie, which is confusing, so online it is just M instead. The way I don t have one standard first name could actually be a metaphor for my poems, because many of them deal with a sense of muddled identity or clouded realities. 59 58