Barbara Quick
Blood Pressure
I have a tiny ovoid blood-pressure pill,
light blue, that I cut in half
with a plastic machine, a little guillotine,
the pharmacist at Kaiser gave me
when I said I wanted a lower dosage.
Try as I might, my cuts are always
imprecise, and the halves are always uneven.
I have a small round metal box
that must have come from Germany,
that belonged to one of my husband’s
ex-wives. Its prettiness is a nice disguise
for my distress that I need to take
a pill every day, no matter how diminutive
its size.
Every morning, on waking, I prise the box open
and contemplate the tiny blue, uneven
halves, like a school of minnows in a golden sea,
and I ask myself what kind of day is this likely
to be?
My husband’s sleeping face gives none of his secrets
away. I never needed medication
before aligning my life with his. As the level
of his anger lessened along with his drinking,
and we worked on our communication,
I was able to tell my doctor,
I think I’m almost done with these pills.
But life is harder now and much more stressful
with my husband home full time.
Is it a day for a larger half, or even two
of the smaller fragments,
placed side by side on my tongue
and swallowed?
He seems to possess the belief that my purpose in life
is to absorb his pain: to always forgive, always be
giving and kind, no matter how he speaks to me.
He sees my grief as a sign of my cruelty,
as a testament of blame heaped upon
his self-recrimination and feelings of shame.
Isn’t my purpose in life to heal myself?
To comfort the traumatized girl I was,
growing up in a place that was so violent and unsafe,
with a father I loved, whose psychic pain
scarred all of us, whose anguish and psychotic rage
permeated the air I breathed and probably,
like any pollution, damaged my young heart
in some insidious way?
What hubris to think I can heal
the sensitive and tortured man I’ve skillfully chosen
to stand in for the first man I ever loved, who’s dead now.
Who can’t ever be made whole.
How can I protect all those places inside
where my husband’s knives, razor-sharp,
have found their mark?
How can I protect myself and also
be kind, remembering how much I want to heal
whatever wounds reveal themselves,
both his and mine?
Last night was hell and yet we slept.
Today I choose the largest little minnow
I can find.
—Submitted on 10/11/2020
Barbara Quick is the author of The Bus to Apollonia, co-winner of the Blue Light Press Poetry Prize, forthcoming in 2021. She is also the author of three novels, with another forthcoming in 2022. Her poems have appeared in San Francisco Chronicle, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Panoply, Mezzo Cammin, and Monterey Poetry Review, among other journals, as well as in anthologies including Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018). She lives in Sonoma County, Calif. Online at BarbaraQuick.com.
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