THE MADWOMAN AS APOSTATE

Who refuses to confess

earning only the impatience

of contempt. Who is confused

by all the music 

coming down at her

like a litany of everything

she keeps on getting wrong.

Who goes on without excuses

for her poor performance

her fumbles and missteps,

misreading all the cues,

standing when she should sit

speaking when she should sing

stumbling over every step

of even the simplest

celebrations. Who keeps

trying to get small enough

to get lost in the corners

to be overlooked and innocent

of catastrophe, still

trying to make the cut

the way she used to

easy and effortless,

but failing, fading, falling

farther and farther

into the airless room

with no furniture

and a locked door

and one small window

she can’t look through-

She knows they can’t see 

anything but the Chimera

that has replaced her,

wrestled her down into a hold

she can’t escape

telling her she must break

the world back out from under

the thick membrane

that stops her breath, deadly

and efficient as diphtheria-

though smashing glass won’t

bring the colors back

or lift the sentence of despair,

just confirm the fright

she sees in faces

trying to assure her

she is not to blame

for this outrageous failure

that if she’d only stop

trying so hard

if only she’d be quiet

and stop crying

if only she’d settle down

to a smaller definition

wear her diagnosis

like a proper badge of shame

things would be better

and she’d feel so much lighter

free of rage and memory

unremarkable and tame.



I SEE A RAPTOR RISE

And ache for her wings

her sharp eyes, her fierce insistence

of need without apology,

My old mythology imagines me

like the phoenix, whose story

we know too well to believe-

some things there’s no rising from

some crash and burns

some carpet bombs

leave nothing to recover,

a tragedy whose challenge

can swamp whatever poor

resources you’ve been well enough

to keep. And though I might

have made a comeback

once or twice, a golden girl

like a phoenix rising

from her own ash

these years I’m much more

like the crow, dark

and quarrelsome, hoarding

shining fragments of the past

feathers dusty and unkempt

clever with sticks

unearthing hidden treats

keeping memories alive

longer than expected

full of grudge and malcontent

her song a croak and caw

raw and gritty as revenge

too much fuss to be welcome

with her wild stories

and brash assumptions

everyone’s problem sister,

crazy aunt, full of tricks

and bad jokes, undeterred

by even the best scarecrows

who knows her time is short

and when she’s gone to gray

her luck used up, her magic spent

there’ll be no resurrection.

ABOUT THE POEMS: These poems come out of a life long struggle with mental illness, that sometimes seemed impossible to survive. At my lowest points all I had worked to achieve was lost in another “crash and burn” and I had to start again from scratch, finding myself without a career or safe foundation. Dreams, relationships, hopes and ambitions all disrupted and consumed. When all seemed lost I started writing, every day, and poetry led me through recovery. Writing helped me see and understand in a new and more powerful way, the processes of thought, emotion, experience, memory, impulse and action. In poems I could shout, sing, whisper, remember, discover, and refuse. Writing thousands of poems became my way of healing, of discovering the roots of trauma, understanding the shape in what seemed only chaos, and finding the strategies that brought resolution. Among the biggest roadblocks were stigma and shame, giving voice to my experience is a way to detoxify them. My work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, most recently in Third Wednesday, Earth’s Daughters, The Ekphrastic Review, and Gyroscope.

E: Mmccarthy161@gmail.com