We watched as she drowned, but at least we watched.
We attended to our need to see her drown, but at least we attended.
No clarity but in the sentence, edited.
Clarity is not relief, though it may be sculptural.
She disappears into her socks, the ones they gave her to wear on wood floors.
The television spouts football history. She has forgotten mine, hers, ours.
Depressed people can’t remember their feelings, an article tells me.
My depressions were punctuated by floods of memories.
When her friend reminded her of the beauty of the church where they'd attended a concert--the vaulted ceiling!--she shrugged.
This morning emerges, lacking detail, as if the present also can be forgotten.
We don’t talk about the benefits of amnesia, only the way it strips us of our stories.
She in her socks sits in a gray plastic chair too heavy to throw.
She in her pinkish glasses looks at us. She seems too sane to be here, a doctor said.
A woman carrying her own big belly wanders through the common area, talking.
A black man in cornrows watches Earl Campbell on TV.
A white man in scrubs wanders by in socks, pulls a phone off the wall, whispers in it.
I’m surrounded by the rhetoric of need. Can I turn the mirror back?
I remember sentences, how comforting they were.
Those most unable to communicate shall have no devices with which to communicate.
I will buzz you in, says the young woman with repaired clefts, a lisp.
I will walk you out, says another woman, who thanks us for visiting.
Someone needs to take care of me.
This place is “more genteel than the other one.”
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