Poetry: Selections from Evyenia Downey

Control

 

Check the oven. Check the clock. Check myself

in the mirror, rumpled silhouette, wrung

like a discarded sponge.

One. Two. Three.

One. Two. Three. Repeat the cycle until

the same bottle of soap that protects me, drowns me.

I lather my hands long enough to cleanse

myself of the sticky personality trait

I can’t Lysol into submission.

A Swiffer is just a mop until it becomes a crutch.

I can’t run free and clean the path behind me.

One. Two. Three.

One bottle, two pills, three times a day.

I felt more like a wet rag than a clean slate.

Check the windows. Check the lock.

Stay home where the only physical threat

is the one holding the spray bottle.

It’s a disorder that demands too much

order. It’s a life sentence. It’s a child

who inspects public door handles to find  

the least touched spot and still grabs it with

her sleeve. A teenager who learns to stand

in a bus or subway car without holding a rail.

I am now an adult looking for a different kind of

balance – the trust that the world won’t end if

I don’t lather at the sink seconds within walking

through the front door. That I won’t lose my footing

if my shoes take one step outside the designated

entryway. The spot where germs are

allowed. The spot I can control.

Control.

My therapist says

I need

to

lose

control.

The Night Nurse, Prelude

 

The night nurse stands before me,

a siren white plastic bag in one hand,

a folded set of hospital clothes in the other.

 

I am to discharge myself of clothes

and any identity other than mental patient.

We stand just inside a room for people like me

 

but not inside enough to see behind

the beige curtain spread

across ceiling tracks, a line of hooks

 

dragged into compliance.

I inhale the lemon scented all-purpose cleaner.

Perhaps the chemicals tickle my lungs.

 

Perhaps even my organs are itching to leave.

But I am not alone.

There is a ghost in the squiggles of the floor tiles.

 

A ghoul in the grains of the wooden closet door.

And of course, there is my abandoned escape plan

lurking in the hallway.

Evyenia Downey is a writer and poet from Toronto, Canada. She has an MFA in creative non-fiction from the University of King's College Halifax and a certificate in poetry from the University of Toronto. She write about relationships, identity, and mental illness.