First Day on Anxiety Medication
That morning at my older
boyfriend’s house, after swallowing
my first dose,
I blacked out in the shower,
dry-heaved into the toilet.
His fatherly
voice echoed behind me
in pale lavender, “Side
effects are all in your head.”
I only half heard him, too taken
with the wasted boy staring
back at me in the vanity mirror.
I asked, “Have I always been
this skinny?” My boyfriend watched
me stand on the scale. 118 pounds.
I buried my face into the funeral
of my palms. Now, in the other
room, he irons his shirt. I am
getting used to hearing him
and not seeing him. I am the ghost
my brain has learned to be.
I am always disappearing.
Driving Home after My Boyfriend Tried to Rape Me
Before I left you said, I’ll miss you very much.
I love you endlessly, which was how long
I-85 stretched ahead of me from Atlanta
to the Blue Ridge, and I knew how it felt
to be a tree falling deep in the forest—
Visitation
Mom watches Jurassic Park: The Lost World on TBS
waiting for Friends. I assume she doesn’t know the name
of the network, of the nurse, or of the hospital, but she knows
me. She wipes her mouth. I ask if she’s thirsty.
Yes, she says, with extra ice. Then she asks me to hold
the cup as she pulls back the blanket.
Where are you going?
She says, I want to go home. I want to go outside.
It’s fifty degrees and wet, I say.
But really what I’m saying is,
When you go home, that’s when you’re going to leave
me for good.
May 4, 2020
On Monday, I wake to a call from Grandmom, asking,
Did your mother die?
I went over to the apartment to see her
and the bed was empty.
*
I always thought I would know the moment
she died, that she might come to me
in a dream and say goodbye, or that the glass
beside my bed would shatter:
some sign, some faith in God,
some unbreakable bond between mother and son.
Grandmom didn’t want to see her jaundiced and
swollen in hospice.
She hadn’t talked to her, couldn’t bear
remembering her death instead of her life.
But she called her last night and sang
to her for twenty minutes. 11 hours later,
nothing but white sheets
like how Mary must have found Jesus
when she entered the tomb and was
greeted by an angel.
Andrew Hahn is the author of the poetry chapbook God’s Boy from Sibling Rivalry Press. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.