What I Should Have Said

After my wedding, you relapsed,
came home from detox shaky,
called to seek my advice.

Wary of enabling you,
or enraging my weary wife,
I focused on logistics,
said your girlfriend
and daughter could stay with me,
said it seemed unfair for them
to be made homeless
by your failure to stay clean.

Ever reasonable, you agreed
this made sense, heard this
as a pass, knew they’d be safe,
so left them–and this life–behind.

I could hardly look at your girlfriend
in the weeks after, wanted nothing
to do with your desolate daughter,
covered the mirrors at home because
I could even less bear to look at myself.

How often and crazily now
I circle back to beg and bargain
for one more chance
to field that phone call–
one more chance to sacrifice
everyone else to save you.
So easy to see, once your disease
turned out to be terminal,
what I should have said:

++++“Whatever you need to do
++++to keep yourself alive.”

The Body’s Expression

—Our bodies manifest the pain
our words cannot contain

I.
When my son was an infant,
I couldn’t express my milk
and grew engorged;
my soft flesh turned stony,
any touch excruciating,
no cure but ice.
I wept with longing
to be home nursing,
bathroom pumping
a one-day outlet
that made me miss more
the antidote I craved,
which was not expression
by pump, but my baby back
in my arms, on my breast
longer than six weeks.

My latest maternal pain
also turns me to stone;
still not expression I want,
just my baby back. Instead,
my body finds new outlets.

Motion keeps the pain
at bay: the herniated disc,
the blade-divided heart,
both muted by distraction.
Only when I stand still
do grief’s pincers seize
my lower back, clamp
the spot where my neck
meets my shoulder,
rip my meal back out
through my gasping mouth.

The miracle is: I will be able
to absorb my son’s death,
just not all at once. My breasts
had one day to dry up, don armor,
get back to a job they didn’t want.
What lies beneath them, my enlarged
heart, is a damaged muscle; she won’t
work well against her will; even
pumping double-time she can’t fill,
then empty in so great a hurry.

The needle is in, but speeding
the plunger would kill me. Sometimes
I still need the walls to hold me up.

I’ve been making my way, delicately,
one memory at a time, trying to digest
all the moments that brought us here,
chewing each misstep mindfully,
remembering to breathe between bites,
so the glass is smooth when it goes down,
so I can forgive each choice I made.

Sometimes I forget to pace myself,
and the whole truth rushes in at once,
every mistake I made playing at warp
speed on the zoetrope in my head
until my body rejects the rushing
influx forcefully enough to scare me.

My stiff neck asks how it can ever
turn easily to face this full-on.
I’ve been crawling out of my skin,
wishing to be out of this body
before the full brunt bears down.
No wonder I tear tiny wounds,
scratching at the backs of my hands.

However saddled, here I am;
the six weeks this body fed my son
are the only ones I will ever get;
the lifetime I have left in this body
is all the time I’ll ever have
to love him with every cell.
For that alone, I must continue.

II.
To satisfy my worried wife,
to keep the will to live this life,
I smooth on creams, take
medicines, see doctors,
even though I know there is
nothing left they can fix.

What can a stranger do to treat
the wind-rush of pain I breathe in
upon waking? When my heart presses
out until the membranes near rupture,
it’s up to me to release air from the valve
by breathing in. Then out. All day.

I look at lists of fears
my son’s sponsor
ordered him to write:

“That God is a lie
I tell myself,
that I will die
without doing anything
I hoped to get done.”

I resolve to write a list
of hopes instead,
just as soon as hope
comes back to me.

Lanette Sweeney is a full-time writer thanks to her wife’s support. Her debut poetry collection, What I Should Have Said, focuses on her son’s addiction and overdose death and her slow recovery from profound grief. The two poems featured here are from the book, which is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press; presales are available now. Sweeney’s poetry, essays and fiction have also appeared in Rattle, The Blue Collar Review, and the popular textbook Women: Images and Reality, as well as in daily newspapers. She, her wife, her mother, and her surviving child all live in Western MA.

Header image A Person Without A Cap by Alan Bern