COUNTING YOURS | Meha Semwal Smith
we’ve been given this gift as they spill from our hands, fragments of our souls passing into history, indigestible bones & owl pellets, sticky, painful words—
another gift, the sunshine that spills, slants, saunters into the inpatient psychiatric ward, & the manic poet who delights in the warmth of the fishbowl, the pinewood deck & leaves a trail of disorganized Mozart fragments in her wake, landing her plane, engines running two hundred miles per hour, feet touching the ground but refusing to touch down because it feels so good to be up, skittish but with an operatic show, how our team of seven invites a concert hall performance & theatrical bow from her, she tells me she swallowed the safety pin because she is a method actress & was to play a role in Figaro on her fiftieth birthday—I tell her she’s lucky it didn’t perforate bowel, she says, yeah, that’s why I swallowed the angel afterwards, for protection, & light, & how she glows when we also find the little metal ornament in her abdominal films, her euphoric joy at proof so palpable it burns a hole in our retinas, her gut
the gift of fatigue, hours spent teaching the writer’s family how to touch the elephant in the room, name the tired eyes & thirty pounds lost to depression, show firm kindness to its heavy limbs by calling it by its name, feel its knotted trunk full of guilt, shame, & dreams disrupted by inverted sleep architecture, leathery gray skin, god forgive me my sins, he says, the flavor of psychosis & delusions of ruin in the animal who can’t concentrate enough to remember who it loved & what led it by the hand to stand at the burial site, one foot in the grave, contemplating the long sleep—they loved him but didn’t recognize the petrification, tried to crack its red red wood with sheer force of will, the cold psychotic stare turning the house to stone— I don’t care
what people think of medicines, I’m telling you, I’ve seen lives saved by writing those scripts—helping someone pick up a pen & revise, learn a new language for moving forward—just as I’ve seen lives saved by unwriting what we don’t need—he accepted the gift & swallowed one, then two, then three tiny pills, four tiny words, you choose what’s next, got out of bed, told us he’s hungry for the first time in a year, wrote a list of people he wants to call— sins or no sins, there is nothing to forgive now, unassign the fault in the earth’s crust & marvel at how deep the canyon went, call it words to put on paper, one foot in front of the other, one task: to delight in what you do have left, because someone out there or up there or in there is looking out for you—maybe it’s the woman who swallowed an angel, or the angel, or the act of swallowing the world
Meha Semwal Smith resides in her home state of Colorado with her husband. She is in her last year of training as a child and adolescent psychiatry fellow. Her poetry has appeared in The Human Touch, Damfino Press, Black Renaissance Noire, and the juvenilia; she has also performed her poetry as spoken word at TalkRx. Smith is affiliated with the Lighthouse Writer's Workshop in Denver where she receives mentorship for her writing and is working on a novel.