Dream Coated with Fluoxetine

By Aricka Foreman
I.
When the hollow grows thick, she prescribes
20 mg to take every morning for four to five days,
then increase as tolerated. Take it with fish oil and
a book of artificial light, try not to repeat the question.
What time is morning. What time. Does it break
when one sleazy crow squawks from the oak?

II.
Dystrophy crumples my body to prayer,
water dribbles down my chin, hands numb to the
tips. The body knows what it knows. This empty
house, each window facing away from the road
is something to be grateful for. Everyone’s habit
is different. Sleep and eat: the lies I miss most.
Too early for crab apples and peonies, every green
thing struggles toward the break. The world
brimming with hum. Holding not
the dirge but the exhausted want.

II.
During the shitshow, someone delivers the death again.
You barely squeezed into the pine sent me scrambling
from the bed, emptying every bit into the flush. Someone
propped your favorite pair of green striped Adidas
against the box. A straw fedora shaded your face.

III.
There is no homonym for disappearing, only
synonyms. Vanish into the ivory tower language.
Perish beneath split selves. End her. Die her. Fade.
Dissolve one blue bupropion until numb. Melt away
thick kink with bleach, die one patch pink. Cease
to forget which broken you came here with. Dematerialize.
Wade into the iced water. Wait to pass away.

IV.
I want to believe joy is the best form of gratitude. Promise.
Say Norepinephrine, but really it’s the missing.

Was this what kept you turning under the steel of a song
vibrating against the night?

VI.
Late nights we translated our language for guitars.
Shadows and light from the TV cast across our faces,
two empty whiskey glasses, our city mending its ruin
through our windows from the street below. Before
we sent you to ash, us in the height of summer’s heat
embraced against our ochre brick building before
boarding planes to opposite sides of the country.
It’s like that. Not knowing the last knowing is the last.

Added: Friday, August 4, 2017 / From "Dream with a Glass Chamber" (YesYes Books, 2016). Used with permission.

Aricka Foreman is a writer, editor, and educator whose writings and curation have appeared in The Offing, The Drunken Boat, Minnesota Review, RHINO, Day One, Phantom, shuf Poetry, James Franco Review, thrush, Vinyl, PLUCK!, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation by Viking Penguin, among others. Author of Dream with a Glass Chamber (YesYes Books, 2016), she is a Cave Canem and Callaloo alumni fellow from Detroit, living, working, loving, and healing in Chicago.