7UP
Free Verse Prose Hybrid Poem by Leslie Cairns
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The way you skirted your eyes, covering with sweaty palms meant for handwriting
And memorizing fables and tales of history that you still don’t know
The answers too. Forbidden fruit, you wait for someone
To pick you. Press down your thumb and choose you, out of everyone sitting
Around you.
We are poppies in fields that slumber; Dorothy lies down next to us. We wait
And whimper —
That’s how therapy is for me. The 7 days in between feel like ocean drifts, the currents
Catching up to us in halted breaths. I see my therapist. I hold on to the doorknob for a moment, hoping I could kiss it or curl it in my fist, for later. Watching the traffic, turning on my blinker, idling before I go.
Day 1, after therapy, is the worst. The reality of being alone sinks in, you wait for the apartment to clean itself, for the laundry to sing to you, for your phone to flash — blinking like emergency sirens — for you, a siren’s song, your mother calls. You ignore it, press yourself facedown
On the couch, and sleep there, instead of working.
Day 2, The numbness sets in, a cradle without a crown–
Day 3, The halfway point, but you wonder if the bread loaf, cracked open like a hug worth taking, ever gets used. If we throw out the bread, instead, forgetting that there’s some left.
Day 4, A hope that burns like acrid cigarette smoke mixed with chugging stale gas station coffee. You wonder if she thinks of you too, then you blush crimson for thinking that way. Therapists should not be friends, they should just be a home on the ticking clock of the hour, spiraling towards oblivion —
Day 5, I binge on food, or shows, or dancing until my toes blister. I pick a poison; I watch myself — like Alice with her apron — grow or shrink in houses. I half listen to conversations, and I whittle down my nail beds. I think of the couch that must be seating others, open like a palm frond, wondering where, exactly, I fit.
Day 6, Emotions gash in and out. There’s anger when I take a turn too loud, and sadness when the day feels too silent and soft. I don’t speak for hours, and no one listens.
Day 7, Back around again, a pond that has an eventual circular end. She tells me, with a smile that is pitying and warm and vulnerable and all the things that are still left unsaid.
She says, why yes, come in.
I wonder if there are other people out in the lonely amber bulbs that blink on and off, the mosquitos that get caught there, the moths that think the fire underbelly is an altar —
I wonder if there are others that count therapy in days of the week, healing in slow days that inch towards a safe moment. If you slice me open, will you find the waiting, the half cloves, the progress notes that split my life into times I sit and shatter while she cups my tears in tissues bent towards gravity, or the ways I wither while I wait
For another chance at clarity? If other patients
Hear my pacing feet, the horse braying impatient
At the wait that it takes
To be seen again.
You press your thumb down on mine and tell me it’s time to get up
Our time is over, for now,
And I dream in warm thumbprints near paper,
In breaks in days,
In wondering who next
Will want me to stand in the front of the room, to be fully seen, spread open,
Wanting you to guess my name.
Leslie Cairns holds an MA degree in English Rhetoric. She lives in Denver, Colorado. She is a Pushcart Prize Nomination for 2022 in the Short Story category ('Owl, Lunar, Twig'), and an honorable mention in Flash 405's call in Exposition Review (2022).