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.