DEATH BY CRAYONS
cw: psychiatric hospitalization
At the psych ward,
Elitist nurses and staff
Forbid patients to use pencils and pens to write,
Since we could easily digress into the dirty
Crazy animals that we are
And start poking one another’s eyes out.
So, whether we want to write in our journals or write a letter,
We are forced to use blunted crayons,
Usually not bigger than two inches long,
To express ourselves.
As I try to write up a complaint
Against one of the unethical nurses,
A male staff member hands me a yellow crayon and smirks.
I grab it, furious and besmirched,
As I rip the whole form up regarding my complaint,
Knowing it won’t be legible,
The yellow whore of a crayon
Has its dirty paper wrapper almost completely ripped off,
And fingerprints of other people dug into its surface.
The male staff member lets out a cold laugh
As he watches me inspect it.
It’s a slow death as they belittle us
With the infantilizing tools we’re forced to write with
What a queer death by crayons.
For the Women Who Mothered Me
cw: psychiatric hospitalization
Women I met in passing
In the eight psych ward stints I did
During this awful, deranged summer
I think of you-
I wear your collected grief like a T-shirt
It’s woven with threads of your stories
With fabric as silken as your hearts
I may be out of that dark revolving door of madness
But I see your faces before I fall asleep
In the dark
Faces of all ages and races
Your words have held me
Your stories have enraptured me
And forever, I'll feel indebted
To help you
As I was powerless to do so this year
And although we’re apart now
Women of the psych wards of 2022
I feel you
You mothered me
While I wilted and drowned
I will never forget our collective strength
And how we found light through laughter
In the darkest of places
I know you remember me too.
I will make you proud.
Complex
cw: sexual assault, psychiatric hospitalization
Rose,
The heavy-set black girl,
Walks around the psych ward
With her fat fingers
Gripping her bible,
Shouting verses at us
Foaming at the mouth with Christ.
She interjects our conversations
With delusions of grandeur.
She’s special, she says.
She’s “highly-blessed”,
And we’re not.
This all leaves us feeling beaten down.
But when she starts recounting days of being raped as a prostitute,
She cries so hard that she falls onto the floor,
Curling up like a baby.
Us women try and comfort her
And hand her back her bible,
But she continues sobbing,
Waving it away.
It just doesn’t seem to help at times like this.
MONICA VIERA is an author from East LA. You can read more of her work on www.wordsbymonica.com and her Twitter @monicaviera92.