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(an excerpt)
Late August,
I speed through the antiseptic tunnel
where the moving dead still talk
of pushing their lines against the thrust
of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel
or the laughing bee on a stalk
of death.
─Anne Sexton, "You, Doctor Martin"
I.
I watched their knee socks walk around us
in the dark—color coded according to grade.
Wearing a tank top and low rise jeans, I
made fun of their drops of summer sweat,
their ugly uniforms.
We were both drunk and I was suppose to be
"keeping an eye on you" because
you couldn't handle your liquor
which is to say, you handled
more alcohol than the rest of us:
you, Gina, couldn't handle yourself.
Camp, still a week away from ending and you,
almost drunk into a permanent stupor.
Even the speed freaks with bursting veins—
not sleeping for weeks and passing themselves off
as anorexic, worried about you in their spare time.
thought about calling ambulances and doctors
as you lay passed out in the shower.
Gina, I still see you in memory—
the exact way those shadows hit your face and fell,
spiraling into the curls of your hair. I was, to say the least,
tipsy, the effects of stolen red-bull and cheap vodka.
For the first time in weeks I was amiable and laughing
with you, a complete stranger until that night on the bench outside.
Surrounded by campers, we were loud and obnoxious.
There was no reason to care because the alcohol that night
was the closet thing to food I'd come into contact with
in three days—the last being
the cherry popsicle that made me sick to my stomach.
You commended me on the way my bones
had stuck out on either side of my sternum.
When I said simply, "I'm not anorexic,"
you nodded, patting me on the arm.
No, no—I know what it's like. You don't have to lie to me.
─Tove Danovich, Traverse City, MI
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