Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of the chapbook Morrisroe: Erasures (89plus/LUMA Publications), and his poems have appeared in The Awl, The American Reader, The Literary Review, and Poetry, among elsewhere. He holds a BA and an MFA from New York University, where he now teaches in the Expository Writing Program.
Amanda Jane McConnon lives on the shore in New Jersey. She has an MFA in poetry from New York University and is a contributor at Late Night Library. Her work has been featured in Best New Poets 2014 and others.
Amanda Jane McConnon lives on the shore in New Jersey. She has an MFA in poetry from New York University and is a contributor at Late Night Library. Her work has been featured in Best New Poets 2014 and others.
ON 5N
by Jameson Fitzpatrick
You Said Forget this Body, I'm Leaving
by Amanda McConnon
In those hours just before I slipped into life
by Amanda McConnon
On 5N
There were two Ashleys, though neither spelled it that way. One was younger and brown-haired and had Asperger's— I wasn't sure why she was there exactly, something about struggling at college, a bottle of pills. Her voice, the loudest on the ward, gave Manic Claudia a headache and an excuse to snap at her every day during lunch, at which point Asperger's Ashley would start to sob about her hypercritical mother and Manic Claudia would roll her eyes, refusing to apologize until finally Eddie stepped in. Everybody liked him except his pregnant wife. He escaped once before I got there, made it all the way to Grand Central, a giant in blue paper scrubs. Blonde Ashley didn't say much, mostly just wandered up and down the ward's L-shaped hallway. She was sweet, had been there for months, long enough she was allowed headphones an hour a day. Once the two Ashleys and I played Scattergories in the big Group room but Asperger's Ashley was oddly competitive given the low stakes and Blonde Ashley could never come up with more than two or three words. It was the ECT, she said, made her head foggy. This surprised me, and then I was surprised anything could surprise me in there. But hard to imagine her like that, electrodes carefully positioned on her scalp, rubber bite block in her mouth. Hard to imagine what she'd done that a doctor would do that— Must have been Sunday, because we had visiting hours after the game: my best friend came, my parents brought me Brussels sprouts from Whole Foods and Blonde Ashley's arrived with the most handsome guy I'd seen on 5N. I wondered if he was her boyfriend and when her parents went out for a pizza decided he was. He sat next to her on a couch at one far end of the L and held her so tenderly it made my eyes wet. How he looked at her. You'd left for a conference at Duke the morning after you took me to the ER and every time one of the two phones rang I'd race to pick it up. Someone speaking rapid Spanish, usually, asking for Esperanza. Later that evening, before my last lights-out, I joined Blonde Ashley on her walk up and down the hall, told her all I needed to do was decide I'd survive losing you—then realized I'd said the same thing to her that morning and worried aloud I'd picked up Manic Claudia's habit of repeating herself. It's okay, Blonde Ashley laughed, I can't remember anyway, and then we stopped right there in front of the nurses' station and laughed for a long time, like crazy, the best laugh of my life.
You Said Forget this Body, I'm Leaving
or a more faithful vessel. I think it was you the day I walked in the woods and heard a hum from all angles with no visible source, as if the trees had finally realized they couldn't move from where they fell as seeds and were fed up with it. You were always fed up with something. One theory: at the moment of death you are born in the same space, but on a frequency just out of the living's sight. Or you choose or don't choose to be born in another form which begs the question: did someone long dead claim the moon, or does it change hands quickly at eclipse? Have you had your turn, coming up dimly, hiding at the end of night like you did as a child behind your mother's skirt? You loved the garden but we couldn't leave you there. Our ashes are so full of us the plants will sense their unlikeness, turn away from them in the ground. Forgive us. While you learn what to do when you do away with a body, we learn how to inherit one.
In those hours just before I slipped into life
like a harbor I was a pain which so engulfed my mother she didn't know my father. This planet the shape of a lost eye. But think of the woodpecker: he knows not to waste his talents tapping the sky. The distance between me and another is a shore so wide I can't stretch to hold it. Fingers, homesick, on somebody's side.
