Her
Addiction
by Mary Sexson
by Mary Sexson
Recompense
You
laid down the needle,
and
took up your life again,
only
looking back to count
the
reasons you had lived.
Your
boy beside you each day
is
enough, you said.
So
we all walk forward
a
few steps, holding
our
breath to see if this
can
last, or will some terrible
pull
breach the dike and drag
you
back into the wash?
You
say you have your own God,
one
the books don’t talk about,
one
who is privy to your fears
and
secrets. But this God
doesn’t
punish, or hold you
down
with guilt. And so I,
in
my faithlessness, call him
to
me, render my recompense,
and
barter for my debt.
Back
Into the Fray
One
hundred days did not
give
you the clarity you sought,
nor
did it remove any obstacles
from
your path. It merely proved
to
be a short respite, for all of us,
from
the relentless grind
of
your addiction. We laid our heads
down,
collectively, and slept
a
dreamless sleep, and woke to find
you
gone again, back into the fray
of
your life, your own war zone,
the
bombs falling all around you.
Rewriting
the Script
I
dreamed I was writing poems
about
you, last night, you burning
in
the fire of your addiction,
tied
to the hopelessness of it
as
if you’d already made the agreement
to
ride this thing to the end,
no
matter what, and then I
was
frantically editing these poems,
moving
your hopelessness off
the
page, inserting courage
and
a resilient spirit, you
saving
yourself over and over.
In
my dream you kept resisting
my
rewrites, changing the script
back
to lost and broken, the vehicle
that
is your life crashed to the side
of
the road, with no survivors, but I
wrote
you back in, crawling
from
that wreckage,
a
strong sponsor answering
your
last cell phone call for help.
People
from a nearby meeting gather
and
lift you off the road, take you
back
to their meeting and hold you
until
the bleeding stops. In my dreams
you
live, every single time.
Bio:
Mary
Sexson is the author of 103 in
the Light, Selected Poems 1996-2000
(Restoration Press), and co-author of Company
of Women, New and Selected Poems
(Chatter House Press). Her poems have appeared in Flying Island,
Tipton Poetry Journal, Grasslands Review, New Verse News, Trip of a
Lifetime, Ichabod’s Sketchbook IV, Sustainable Indiana, the Shared
Spaces/Shared Voices project, and several anthologies, including
Reckless Writing (2013),
A Few Good Words (2013),
The Best of Flying Island
(2015), and Words and Other
Wild Things
(2016). Her newest work is in HoosierLit Literary Magazine (The Geeky
Press), Flying Island, and Tipton Poetry Journal (Brick Street
Poetry). She has two Pushcart Prize nominations.