by Lois Chapin
On the stage a guy with a drum did a Cherokee chant.
It wasn’t church music.
They gave her a day pass.
She’d been there for 30 days now.
After this we were going to eat artichokes
on Cannery Row,
at a table
with no other patients.
She wouldn’t have to wash the dishes.
Her head bobbed.
I heard a joke once
about sleeping in church.
I listened without understanding.
I was always waiting on hold.
Her jaw was slack.
Her head nodded forward.
I read the back of an offering envelope
with a picture of Lakshmi
spinning something.
My daughter made a little snoring noise.
I reached up
and rubbed her neck
her eyelids lifted
a crack.
They focused on something
outside the window.
Before it had pews
this white building was a real estate office.
The two big screens were in color.
My daughter sat still.
A yellow pencil from the back of the pew
lay next to her flip-flops.
Her smooth fingers weren’t spelling
the last word of each sentence.
Her knee,
inside her black tights,
wasn’t bouncing.
Her breathing didn’t move her chest.
I massaged her leg.
“Have some more ice water,”
I whispered.
She lifted her purple water bottle
the air whistle in as she chugged.
When the ice clanked against the plastic,
the woman next to me rubbernecked.
In family intensive
yesterday
I talked about how things might be
at home.
We got 90 extra minutes alone
with the therapist.
I had lots to say.
Three psychiatrists,
two nurse practitioners,
one GP
and an RN
all said Suboxin
couldn’t get her high.
It could save her life
they all said.
It has an agonist and antagonist,
they all said.
I took lots of notes
on what they all said.
“Please don’t be mad,”
she whispered.
She dozed off again.
Her water bottle dropped to the office building carpet
and rolled under our pew.
Unchained Predator
Once,
dressed in all white,
he cried
watching me
walk toward him.
Then I found out about
the brutal rapes.
Not all of them,
of course,
just of his two young sisters
and of his mentally-impaired
younger brother,
and mine,
a teenager drugged,
by the voyeur rapist.
One he set up
in Mazatlán
and watched
from the end
of a dark alley
smelling of rotting
fish heads and used
tequila.
So today,
his estate attorney
called my nephew.
All the money from
business-raping
his best friend
into Job-like
poverty and divorce,
the 450,000 he raped from his
dying parents’ trust,
the consummation funds
outlined in our
prophylactic prenup,
and all the revenue
from the sale of his franchises
and the house,
where he raped two decades
of bar flies,
was now liquidated.
Every. Last. Cent.
Tapping his phone
my nephew says,
“His attorney called to tell me
he’s depressed.”
I stop.
I look out the window.
Why bother.
My son can’t prevent the inevitable.
I Step Down
from the slick step of the SUV
into the dark drizzle of 5 AM,
at that park.
That park where I would never
have allowed my children to play.
That park where families
don’t spread out picnics.
That park where
they live.
Outlines of shadows blink
dim street lamp light.
“I’ll count,” I whisper in a hoarse voice.
“You ask the surveys?”
Three AM my alarm shook me awake
Last Saturday’s training a decade ago.
We’re given instructions.
Check bushes,
corners,
backsides of industrial buildings.
They meant homes.
He holds
McDonald’s gift cards
and plastic bus passes
in his grown-up hand.
The same hand
that shakes incarcerated indigents’
as their young public defender,
mountains of harassing camping citations.
Headlights.
A car in the dawn
splashes down Harbor Blvd.
Glad we stopped
for hot coffee before our jaunt
around this park.
When had they had hot coffee?
“Have the flashlight?” my son asks.
He shines it on pages
of question marks.
Question marks that can’t begin to ask.
I tally shopping carts
overflowing with
precious belongings.
I count cars with blanketed
cracked windows.
Tents buried under layers of canvases
keep out the rain.
We explore damp corners
burrows of human habitation.
Everything is asleep at 5 AM,
even in that park.
The round faced
slippered
Asian
woman
shuffles out
from nowhere,
rolled shoulders pushing
one rusty grocery cart
pulling another,
both covered with dew-splattered
blue tarps.
I tally: Woman,
Age: 40-50,
Street.
“May we ask
you a few questions?”
Her eyes narrow
staring straight ahead
gripping the bar of her cart.
“I have a gift for you.”
He reaches out
a five dollar card.
“And another
after we’re done.”
She puts the brakes to her short train,
looks up at him.
I remember
reading him, The Little Engine that Could
at bed time.
I wonder
how much, “I think I can, I think I can,”
can really change
this situation.
“Census helps
secure funding for homeless programs
in Orange County,”
he explains.
shadows emerge
from the grey light
moving with
zombie-like curiosity.
“Do these yellow-button people really have free gifts?
They safe?
Can I circle around
be questioned again?”
“Rain wasn’t why the police rounded up our friends last night!”
“The OC keeps its homeless hidden.”
“I know a McDonald’s serving breakfast
right now…”
The dawn peeks over
that park.
A mocking bird warbles
above a makeshift tent.
Bedraggled souls
step out
from a packed unmarked bus
dropping them off
leaving behind a cramped night on
Armory mats
into their daytime home.
“We have a gift
for you.”
He says again,
before they shuffle off
to familiar corners of
that park.
Who’s Crazy?
A Quality of Life Inventory.
A Minnesota Multifaceted Personality
and six of her cousins,
dots blotted out
plotted on a T score
crucified on a worker’s comp cross
bleeding on to one date
of birth
life after another.
Relapsing,
legitimizing reliability
legitimizing validity
legitimizing there’s no confidentiality
in forensic evals.
My son works
to send the insane to Metro,
better meds than prison,
but the test taker was a nurse
attacked by my son’s saved.
Now they do calisthenics
on the back patio of my office
between coloring in dots on the tests.
It’s a thin line
often blurred.
Another Rebel Heart
I open a book to the inside jacket and scan.
My son’s taken up flying.
My daughter’s almost 2 years clean.
I hired a babysitter for my dog’s
unsteady hips.
My rectangular dragon boat paddle
and the pear-shaped outrigger one,
are locked in my trunk
at the airport.
Both teams medaled this weekend
without me.
But here I sit
on the scarred hardwood floor
of the upstairs poetry room
in City Lights.
The smell is one from my childhood,
Acres of Books in Long Beach.
“Can I help you find anything?”
the woman asks.
There’s nothing to find
if I forget that I’m looking.
My son’s heart is shattered by a six-year relationship.
My daughter’s sewing hers back together without a needle.
My dog, Anubis, will soon arrive at the canine underworld.
The floor to ceiling books surround me
in this windowless room.
I want to absorb the courage
and creativity
of all its ghosts.
My own are bored with arthritis
and taxes.
As an ironing board,
my nose permanent pressed the smell of burnt dinners,
the smell of smoke in my thrift store clothes,
the smell of too much hate,
the smell of hiding,
the smell of superiority by virtue of the right religion,
the smell of Linkettes and Nuteena.
But, on those special outings
after visiting my great-grandmother, Mimi,
in Long Beach,
who carried with her the smell of liniment,
after that,
bliss.
Patina hardwood floors beneath rows of dusty books.
That was my real home,
the one where I grew up.
Where I towered above fundamentalism.
Where I found my head in the clouds.
Where I lost touch with reality.
Sitting here on the floor,
in my tennies and jeans,
I search for one word or maybe even a sentence.
I want those with rebel hearts to show me
how to make a difference.
My daughter loves Bukowski.
My son, Kerouac.
Anubis is still iconic.
And I’ve found someone who loves this room
as much as I do.
“No, thank you,”
I say to the clerk,
“I’m fine.”
The Father
The father sat on my couch
his wide eyes
turning red a little on the bottom lids.
I had seen his first kid years ago.
I told him her anorexia and addictions
were worse.
Unfortunately, I was right.
She died in her car
in the parking lot of a mall.
He thinks I can predict the safety of his younger
daughter now.
The girl tells me she’s a normal college student
experimenting
like any teenager.
The father looks at me expecting me to fix his pain.
I tell him I don’t have a crystal ball.
The father and daughter leave my office.
I stare at my fish tank.
The frogs paddle to the surface for air.
They’re amphibious.
I get living in two worlds.
When my frogs die I buy new ones for the kids to name.
I don’t have replacements for my dead patients.
Juilliard
Our footsteps echo
through the late-night Lincoln Center
walking in the heart
of a sleeping Olympian.
Three blonde women
and one
with velvet ebony skin.
Her father’s girlfriend
had been the first
to test positive.
Her mother never
threw him out.
We explored at a clip
after asking a lone valet
for directions to the iconic institution.
We centrifuged through the giant
glass door
and were flung onto the stairs
along rows of benches.
“I just wanted to see it,” the black girl said.
She’d wanted to try real New York cheesecake,
see a rat in the subway,
and this, the stairway to young dreams
that led
to the blue Juilliard Bart Simpson
punishment wall.
A starched guard read at his desk
not noticing,
like she tried to do
when her mother gave her father
fistfuls of pills
in a trembling Libby’s
She started writing daisy petal poems
to not see
the box of small latex gloves
unopened,
unobtrusive,
unnecessary.
“You were at a Performing Arts High School,”
one blonde woman said.
“Right? Voice, right?”
I’d heard that voice
escaping its shattered container
deep inside her.
I didn’t know it broke
her into a performing arts school.
The floor-to-ceiling revolving doors spat
us back out on the street
next to the number
on a headstone
for so many dreams.
“Yeah,” the ebony one said.
“I just wanted to see where I’d be
if my mom hadn’t died.”
J.B.
They rescued him,
their cuckolded father,
from the bitch tyrant
who died 3 months ago.
The three daughters expected him
to dance with them,
to thank them,
to embrace them.
But no,
he sobbed for his beloved,
the touch of her
the site of her
the smell of her
the taste of her.
First the ischemic sadness burst vessels
into cerebrovascular grief.
Then colorectal carcinoma blocked his ability
to give a shit about what his kids thought.
His lungs filled with holy water
in an attempt to drown his sorrow.
But the morphine drip brought it all back.
The first time he saw the back of her legs
bending over
to release the heavy rubber
Mineralite ball
rumbling down a polished wood lane.
Yes, of course, he knew her flaws,
but the Beta-endorphin floods of make-up sex
smacked him back hard.
She needed him so much
it broke his heart.
So, the doctors fixed it
with a new bovine valve,
better than the ones he’d replaced
in those nitrogen hot rods.
But this goddamn one
anchored him to this pathetic world,
where he was a burden to his six kids.
The synthetic opiates fired up those
long-dormant dopamine race ways.
The ones that came to life watching her slip a bra strap
down a tanned shoulder.
He begged for his heart
to break now,
to shatter into a thousand shards,
to explode inside his chest,
to crush his breath,
just like it did back then,
when he fell in love,
