Cinthia Ritchie
CRAZY, THEY SAID
I started laughing
in the Kmart fitting room
and couldn’t
stop,
it was too damned funny,
that shirt and pants,
and see those shoes
trying to walk away
with that lady’s feet?
They ushered me
to the back,
gave me water and aspirin,
but I could feel
bras and girdles inside
my eyes,
and when I reached for the
stapler,
(stand back, everyone stand back)
they hurried off and called the cops.
Two men rolled me away
and stuck tubes
down
my throat, lights across my teeth,
I was flying,
colors swinging,
so beautiful,
I was partying with Jesus
at the Last Supper,
guzzling grape Kool-Aid and
eating Velveeta cheese, and when Jesus
caught me
wiping my nose on the tablecloth,
she just winked
and handed me a napkin
(Modess, for those trying times of the month),
soft,
so soft,
I was
falling
down
to see Oprah
my tongue fattened on
bars,
cars,
and oh Sweet Jesus, girl,
stars.
I woke two days later
on a ward filled with women
in a city I couldn’t remember visiting.
Beyond the mesh window, the sky was gray
and cloudy, my skin winter pale
when I pulled up my gown and examined
my belly, lonely and flat,
a bruise spreading my hip
like the bite of an angel.
—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness
__________
Cinthia Ritchie: “I’ve struggled with depression most of my life, have been hospitalized twice, used to take a slew of pills but now train and run ultra-marathons (and oh, that runner’s high!). I see the world differently; I have no desire to see it as it is, thank you very much. I love/seek/hotly desire the sexy spaces between words, I embrace pauses, roll my tongue over periods and oh, how it lingers on semi-colons! I will never be normal. There is something wrong with my head; there’s something right with my head; there’s something different with my head. My poems are my ‘normal.’ They’re my stabilizing factor, my Prozac-without-funding-the-pockets-of-big-pharm-America, my taste of what it must feel like to wake each day unburdened by the thoughts, obsessions, and darkness inside one’s own mind. And may I be blunt here? I love words more than I love most people.” (website)
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