Poetry By Tammy Smith

Buffy May CC




My Psych History Is Longer Than a Child’s List to Santa

Strength is strange like that.
It takes the shape of intake forms, clipboards, charts,
ticking clocks, groups of hard red chairs
in a tight, misshapen circle, scraping the floor.

You’d never know how dangerous
the route a dark-eyed cop took when he
drove me to the hospital—you’d never guess
how fast he sped
while I barfed, handcuffed,
in the back of his cruiser.

Strength smells like vomit.

The psych ward was never meant to be home.
But nurses have a way of acting like mothers,
and I didn’t have one.

Their warm, soap-scented hands gave me
a stick of gum to chew or tuck into my back pocket,
something to savor before bed.

Soothing voices
coating the soreness
of screaming, sobbing, standing, staring
into hospital mirrors, poking
at my flaws in fake glass.

Twenty years later, trauma-trained,
I’m the therapist I once needed.
I’m the loving mother my favorite
nurse, Debbie, told me I could be.

Eight weeks pregnant,
hospitalized for the last time--

Nurse Debbie told me,
“Your baby is lucky.”





​When My Son Asks Why None of My Poems Are About Him

Because I promised myself I wouldn’t 
turn motherhood into martyrdom: 

deadbeat dads draining their families’
bank accounts for beer, bouncing 

checks to bet on racehorses, punching
holes through concrete walls.

My son’s legacy won’t repeat
what broke me: San Francisco--

breathing into a paper bag whenever
a rat crawled past me, pissing

in a tiny sink in a roach-infested
hotel room because I had nowhere else

to go. I won’t write the greatest
single mother survival poem to prove

my son’s life is better because he can
shut his bathroom door, or claim mine

means nothing without him
sprawled against his bed, singing.

It’s true, but it’s not his fault 
my best poems are born

 from my most tortured states,
 odes and elegies rising

from my lips. The last time 
his father covered my mouth

he swore I’d never speak again. 
He underestimated how

high a mother’s voice rises
at the end of her sentence--

I stretch my lungs
to match my son’s pitch.



​
Tammy Smith is a poet and licensed clinical social worker from New Jersey. She is winner of the 2026 Four Feathers Press Chapbook Contest. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Thimble Literary Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, The New Verse News, San Pedro River Review,  Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She received honorable mentions in the Journal of New Jersey Poets 2026 Poets Prize and the 2026 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards.