When You (Don’t) Get Better by Camille Ferguson
Associate poetry editor Sally Geiger on today’s bonus poem: Camille Ferguson finds both pain and sensuality in memory’s embrace, interrogating the roles of drugs, dreams, automobiles, and fruit as we transition into whomever we choose to be. This poem is both a prayer to the queer oracle, and a document of the quotidian eroticism that vacillates through gender’s abyss.
When You (Don’t) Get Better
You outsmart the sad parts. Trick it with lavender oil, grapefruit facemasks, songs it can’t be nostalgic to. Happy lamps, citrus scented dish soap. You’re privy to its triggers, how long drives on country roads get so dark. You know all the turns. So you take the others. You drive through orchards. You pick fruit from the window of your car. You dip it in chocolate. You eat sliced apples in bowls of spinach, lemon poppy seed dressing. Goat cheese. You put on your best sweater, write your brother in basic an upbeat letter, you look in the mirror & say I can be this person.
You don’t shave your head & you don’t become they because you know how many cracks are in the foundation & you aren’t sure if you’re ready to fall through them. You think you can still step out of this forecast: the one where you’re the thing which implodes—where you’re the fault line.
In dreams you dress like your father & you know what to say: it’s okay that you’re gay because you’re dating a man. Things sour, again. In the awake world, your brother calls you thirty-five percent gay. He says, you’re dating a guy—how gay can you be? You think you have no idea. You fantasize sawing your phone in two perfect halves: beautiful, binaries. You dream another dream in which you push a woman onto a memory foam mattress. The tide comes in & floods the room.
When you don’t get better on Prozac you stop taking it & you know this won’t make you better, either, but you like the curve of this road. Maybe you’ll find where rage lives. You smell dirt & thunder. Lightning-struck-pear-shaped womxn. Person with big, splintering pit in them. You remember rage, exquisite. Lovely in its poison. Throat-screams, driving with your knees. You remember misery & exhilaration. You remember the womb before that second X, stuck in some safe place between gender, & world.
Awake, the sky riots. The fruit rots. You stomp the pedal, it’s an apricot. You’re raw, alive in the way that hurts the best. You’re the color of an almost healed bruise, & you push it.
Camille Ferguson is a queer poet from Ohio. Camille recently graduated from Cleveland State University, where she received the Neal Chandler Creative Writing Enhancement Award. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, Okay Donkey, Flypaper Lit, and Zone 3, among others.
