Featured Poet: Meaghan Quinn

Detox

After shitting for 3 days straight
I double over at the methadone counter in an almost surrender.

On my knees on my knees on my knees. In the shower I smoke.

Now that the methadone protocol’s over my eyes bulge black. Hot rain
crawls across my chest. When a patient hands me a decoy orange, there are two Clonidine underneath it. I swallow them both  still rattling.

Cannot stop bouncing my leg. Someone pop a movie in the DVD player. Someone skin me
                                                                                                                                                      from myself.

At the nurses station I pick up the phone to call the only God I’ve ever truly known and tell them I can’t do this. That I’m leaving my degrees and chalk behind. To live out of a backpack. With a man named after Ziggy Stardust.

                            Every self-serving ounce of me believes I will do this.

I remember little of the next few days, except that I left
and his turtle sniffing around in a dry fish tank         Ziggy and I ate pasta
sopped Ragu sauce out of the pot in his basement
drywall flaked around us        was it his hands or my mouth
                                                                                          I never came/come to     
one of us crying on the floor clutching our Insurance card
The turtle tapped the glass as I blinked from sleep to dream         reciting
Hamlet’s soliloquy under my breath

that most simple infinitive in the English language
to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be




April in Treatment

The chick with 3 amber dots in her eyes
reads my birth chart, shakes her head,
then blowing smoke in my face, she says
matter of factly, “Ya, you’re on your last life.”

This is how treatment begins.

Part of me is haunted, the other climbs closer to the cosmos.

I start to smell rain again
and realize that you can’t really know rain until you’ve lost it.

We blare Future and sprawl our limbs across the Adirondack chairs after chore time.
A pregnant chick plays volleyball in the backyard, Newport 100 dangling from her mouth.
I’ve never seen someone grin so wide.

Come night I toss through the hours,
drag the mattress into an old crib room
-- branches scrape the window and I sweat in a set of matching pajamas.

My roomie smuggles a ziplock of Folgers
in her bra because she misses the pouch of dope
that so often nestled against her nipple
hidden and I identify. Over and over, I identify.

I start eating food again. Walking the yard.
Laughter comes. And joy, too.




Addiction


Imagine we are all here.
All thirty-seven women
outside on the lawn
wildflower catching in our toes.
We stand frozen,
sealed in night’s haiku,
an arm’s length
apart under a volleyball net.
The volley ball has rolled off
to the side of the net,
not one of us speaks
or moves.
Hot molasses scents the yard.
We stand an arm’s length apart.
No noise save the crinkle of blinking.
We stand as in a game of Mother May I?
Unsure of our next step
or if one of us will pick up the ball.
I fear walking off the lawn altogether.
But I am stuck.
Then the right hand
of one of our Fathers
floats across the lawn.
He makes his way toward us
and takes his right hand
and with his right hand
He taps each woman’s shoulder.
After the tap
some women stay standing
but then one girl,
then two, then seven, then twelve
women lower, drop onto the lawn
as slowly as rain falling from a lake.
Those on the lawn
sit crisscross applesauce.
Their eyes stop blinking.
Look around. How many still stand? ​

Meaghan Quinn is the author of Slow Dance, Bullets forthcoming from Route 7 Press. She holds an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College and has studied at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. She has been nominated for Best New Poets and the Pushcart Prize and is a recipient of the Nancy Penn Holsenbeck Prize. Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Impossible Archetype, Off the Coast, Heartwood, r.kv.r.y., 2River, Adrienne, Free State Review, and elsewhere. She resides on Cape Cod.

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