Ryan Clark: 5 Poems

(CW: suicidality)

Percocet Prescription, 11/1/23

for MG, on our 14-year anniversary

Fourteen years today I love you so much even
more than dying out of such a world a love

​beyond a severed barbwire fence a vein
rusted shut O when would we age enough

​for a fatal accident before our seventies I hope
let everyone reach fifty except for me prescriptions

​overflowing with future enough for all to advance
toward utopia as if it would arrive without my

​rotted ass vanished from this sphere O
I hope you make it to that quiet day of light I do.

Percocet Prescription, 11/4/23

following the Texas Rangers’ World Series win

​Foreign this sense of victory, Texas victory in five,
in Game 5 beside my father after a far drive

​for a share of this moment, open-eye fantasy
moment of non-death. I force a faint flutter

​of each eye for effect and feel endless relief.
Our sighs, seize of breath, what water we are,

​what reef to hold fast during such waves
as a favorite team, awful surf. Yet now we win

​this memory, a roof over us, as we move
unwrecked into a new knowledge of dawn.

​Percocet Prescription, 11/10/23

​I know where the pills are and what to take
as an effect-magnifier, how can I forget a way

​forward does not necessitate dying today and this
is a fine ember, I know, wood is finite I see

​scattered twigs ash-ready and phantom in a field,
I'm so tired I'll fetch them later it's fine.

​I need to refocus. A long zero is waiting lazy
in our remaining distance. Its vividness arrives

​in unsettling visions and none of these involve
an overdose. A violent end is more fanciful:

​red splash, so operatic, and so removed.

​Percocet Prescription, 11/13/23

​A force didn't pull me back from death,
I am a coward so afraid to fail I failed

anxious in the car. A doctor wrote a file
saying weak attempts, even medical experts

​have codified the failure I am. Survival
lay me forever in debt I know you hope

​I define as a second chance, no interest
accrues for a way of living at the lip of zero.

​I turn and face it often, there is a version of life
in this, even failure leads us somewhere

​I assure you, quiet, I know a way.

​Percocet Prescription, 11/15/23

​I have clung so long to this hatch for leaving,
so easy, what have I lost from this feeding

​on zero. I eat doughnuts alone out of sight
(so many zeroes), vanish their sugar like ash

​to the wind off a cliff in the dark, slow wave
break, you know the movement, the white

​fate of crash. Supplies run low (NO REFILLS
REMAINING) when a body is so soon

​severed from the will to survive. I will lose
teeth or a foot, so afraid to visit a doctor

​or a dentist for what they'd tell me, how
easy to quit, to be whole, and to wave.

Ryan Clark writes his poems using a unique method of homophonic translation. He is the author of Arizona SB 1070: An Act (Downstate Legacies) and How I Pitched the First Curve (Lit Fest Press), and his poetry has appeared in such journals as DIAGRAM, Interim, The Offing, and SRPR. He now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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Maddie Downie: 3 Poems