Poetry by Caroline Erickson

​Kimmo Räisänen CC



Temperance


Disco Elysium is a game
in which you try to drink yourself to death.
The irony was not lost on me
as I sat down to play it in an empty house,
resolved to drink from noon until I went to bed.

I don’t want to die--
I didn’t even want to get that drunk,
I had water in between each glass of wine, look, I’m
good. I’m very functional. When my friends and I drink we drink
for sport, for the thrill of limitations, young greyhounds
bounding down the lusty green. Five in the morning
and sitting on Nikola’s bathroom floor, in between bouts
of puking in their toilet, I meditated
on the grime between the shower tiles
and the memory of my brother
gagging over pink buckets, the nurse
pressing lavender essence to his nose. Once you are well,
it is so hard to remember sickness: later that day
I would lay on Sam’s couch and slow jazz would play
over my body, hollowed out and scraped clean.

In Disco Elysium, a drunk falls and cracks his head open on a bench,
and you must go to his two-room apartment to tell his wife
and two girls that he is dead. The graffiti artists here
paint with heavy fuel oil, red as blood,
and half the city was never rebuilt after the bombings.
You have a dream of your body
hanged from a tree, and it turns
like a temperate dancer
in the disco ball light.
Still, in the cold morning, when you stand by the sea,
the waves roll, the gulls call.
The reeds glimmer with a golden sheen.
The living world
and its singular beauty: the hospital
had a rooftop garden, and I would carry
my brother’s oxygen as my mother
wheeled him out into the sun.
The hyacinths were closed tight, only
green on green, but I was coming back
in a few weeks. I told my brother I was looking forward
to seeing them bloom, but in the middle of March,
his lungs, during a routine operation,
flooded with blood.
I came back
to his bed, instead, and him laid out
so quiet in it.

In April
my mother and I would sit on the patio
and watch the maple’s leaves unfurl.
We drank all the beer in the house, and then agreed
not to buy anymore. I worry too much about addiction
not to have a fine flaw that could crack the marble of my life
right down the middle. I love oblivion,
the same as everybody else, and I have terrible
self-control. My mother buys me packs
of green gum, and I chew through one a day.

I do know
my compulsions. I have had clear instruction
on how to dash my life against the rocks,
but I carry my responsibility on my back
like a child, my arms hooked under her legs.
Together we make our way along the icy seaside,
her rosy cheek pressed to mine. In Disco Elysium,
Elysium is the nickname people have given the world,
a term of endearment for all the tender
terror and glory wrapped up in geography and armies,
marriages and dance clubs and paintings on abandoned walls.
Disco is dead, but somebody loves you.
Something beautiful
is going to happen.

The last day I saw my brother alive,
we tried the cafeteria humus, and he coached me
through a Dark Souls level on the hospital Xbox,
until I gave up, laughing, and he relieved me of the controller
to beat the level handily. He was in recovery
after the transplant, his new heart and lungs
working admirably--a little too big
for his skinny chest, but they said
he’d grow into them.
I can’t tell you how beautiful my brother was that day.
Every image I have
is just synecdoche: his golden hair, his clear
and rosy skin, the flash of his big blue eyes
can all only stand in
for the whole and total thing.
Never again will I know
the whole and total thing.

Some days, I wake up and I want a drink.
In my bed with its clean sheets,
the dappled light of the sun
through my lace curtains, and I want a drink.
Today, though, I have too much work to do
to court annihilation.
Today, I go downstairs
and put the big skillet on the stove,
drizzle in the olive oil, start chopping cucumbers.
I grab salt and the spice mix
with the nice paprika, and I lay
my cucumber slices flat in the pan.
Rice my mother made two days ago
comes out next, then the carton of eggs onto the counter.
Test the cucumber slices--fork tender,
so I do a splash of heavy cream
and a little more salt
and put the rice in, to heat. The eggs come last,
and I break the yolks in yellow flourishes.
I stir until it thickens, the eggs cooking through,
and then shuffle it all into a small white bowl.
At the kitchen table I sit one space over
from my brother’s. I eat my breakfast. I live.



Caroline Erickson is a queer poet and teacher from Kansas and an incoming MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. Her work can be found in After the Pause and the VCWC anthology Nuances, and she can be found on Instagram @c.erickson42.
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