It’s Tuesday and I Guess I’m Addicted to Vicodin Now by Kindall Fredricks
Associate editor Sally Geiger on today’s bonus poem: Today’s poem by Kindall Fredricks confronts the ruinous lyricism of addiction, tumbling through trauma’s caesuras for explanations that hurt as much as they answer. The imagery is vivid and desolate, but the language always stays close to the deeply human capacity to survive through suffering.
It’s Tuesday and I Guess I’m Addicted to Vicodin Now
which is to say I’m not going to be sad about
the turtles anymore how did i not notice
how grassy i was sunlit & down-feathered
to the touch how easy it was to twist
the stinger from my palm the way
it clicked when i split it in half is this
how everyone feels like so many swept
balconies purpling in the moon
like the throat of so many birds berrying
every truth into
confession you know when I was seven
my skin smelled like a pond rich
and bluesy i pennied every song every
tenderness i found put it in my pocket without
thumbing off the dirt i loved our motel
vacations the way Mom would say pretend
we’re going to Disney and we’d
sing Poor Unfortunate Souls on the five
minute drive home & I was so chewy
& I was so chewy
that when my dad cracked open
a turtle
dangling from his lure
i said to my brother
it’s okay it’s okay
it should have just
let go anyways
Kindall Fredricks is a practicing registered nurse and an MFA candidate at Sam Houston State University, focusing on both poetry and the intersection of literature and the medical sciences. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Letters, Grist, Sugar House Review, DIALOGIST, Quarterly West, NELLE, The Coachella Review, Rust + Moth, Menacing Hedge, After The Pause, Jet Fuel Review, The Academy of American Poets, and more.
