The Anxiety Meds Are Making Me Forget Edges

I step out of my Jesus year changed, wised down and tender. I wish I believed in God because I want my grief witnessed and my mother is too far away. 

I look for other cures, take walks and palm petals. 

Social media sends me reels about hugs, facewash, hotels made of ice. 

*

From one boy, I learn nothing is a game, not even a game. From another that heights are not for me. 

Happens to us all, a woman in a cocktail bar promises me. Sharp nails. 

It’s too late when I interpret the russet droplets on the duvet. Then I bury my cat beneath boulders so rain can’t raise her. 

*

Before seeing A Streetcar Named Desire, I try strangers and kindness. 

After, I try strangers and kindness again. 

(In a book about the power of stoicism, I read half of scientific experiments fail. If possible, it is best to avoid attachment to any particular outcome.) 

*

There is beauty, I never completely forget it. 

The doe eating the neighbor’s cornfeed in the morning mists. Her hearthurt run. Tail, white. Snow. The second boy’s hand around a lime. Later, tunnel of wild rosemary. 

Where did my gut go. Hundreds of setting suns—a flicker.

*

We watch rockets fall out of the sky, the boy and me. I think I will die until I don’t. 

My mother calls again. 

The year ends the way it began: me thinking about deliberate cruelty and Blanche DuBois’s fancy clothes.

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Ashley Dailey (she/her) is a writer and multimedia artist from Georgia. She mostly writes about family and the cultural legacies of the American South. Her work has received support from the Academy of American Poets and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and is published or forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Sonora Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Los Angeles where she is a Dornsife Fellow at the University of Southern California.