Poems
Lexapro, 10mg
That August I chewed a pill
and slept. A green dragonfly lit
my daughter’s hand on fire. Her new
school planted tens of thousands
of dollars in trees, tethered to red
clay newly dug. A rock cracked
a window, I didn’t fertilize the reblooming
azaleas, they didn’t flower. When the dogwood
died I let it sit a month, two, waiting
like you never know. We noticed
spiderlilies in the backyard, red
and delicate. They spread
without any work on the part
of the gardener, and in a few years
that bed will choke on them, full
as a sheet stretched taught on a wire.
A few feet away my autumn clematis
blooms, taking over its arbor, the fence.
Every winter the vine browns
and hangs on unless I cut it back,
which I never do, forgetting in February
the needs of fall. A mockingbird nests,
I rub my hand on the peeling bark of a birch
and isn’t it a miracle how the bees
knew it this year and last, pollen
robbers, that late vine would flower
enough to pollinate a hive
with honey for December.
Self-Portrait with C-PTSD
Perhaps because we haven’t printed many pictures
my children ask a lot about how they were as babies.
What was my first word? Dada for my son, mama
for my daughter. What was I like? is harder.
You were smart, I could say. Truth is I don’t remember
much, not of their baby days or my childhood. Not
grad school classes or high school teachers’ names
or the restaurant we ate steaks at on our honeymoon.
I could tell my children the truth, that C-PTSD is likely
the culprit that took the good, the months when first
baby teeth grew in and fell out, the first solid foods,
the color of blue like cornflowers in their eyes at birth
before the brown from my genes crept in and muddied
them hazel. Sometimes I look at this life like I haven’t lived
any of it. Like my neighbor who emptied a box of sevin dust
in the garden to save her pumpkins only to learn after
the fact it would kill all it touched, too late to wash off.
A dead bee, a moth. For weeks she’d see the bodies feeding ants.
And then sometimes I hear a baby scream in the grocery store
and I’m 29 again, rocking my tightly swaddled infant in
my arms as I sway from foot to foot next to the on but empty
dryer, lights off, the only way he’d sleep for seven months,
and I remember the Fisher-Price activity center strapped
to my crib, the ding of the bell when I played after naps.
Pamela Manasco is a poet and English instructor at Alabama A&M University. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, SWWIM, Susurrus, The Midwest Quarterly, and others, and she’s currently working on finalizing her first poetry collection. She lives in Madison, Alabama with her family. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @pamelamanasco, and via her website: https://pamelamanasco.com.
