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      September 1, 2017Crazy, They SaidCinthia Ritchie

      I started laughing
          in the Kmart fitting room
             and couldn’t
                      stop,
         it was too damned funny,
                    that shirt and pants,
                       and see those shoes
                              trying to walk away
                                         with that lady’s feet?
      They ushered me
                     to the back,
                          gave me water and aspirin,
                                          but I could feel
             bras and girdles inside
                my eyes,
                        and when I reached for the
      stapler,
                    (stand back, everyone stand back)
                                           they hurried off and called the cops.
      Two men rolled me away
                         and stuck tubes
                                           down
            my throat, lights across my teeth,
                                   I was flying,
                                                colors swinging,
                             so beautiful,
                          I was partying with Jesus
                  at the Last Supper,
                        guzzling grape Kool-Aid and
               eating Velveeta cheese, and when Jesus
                                  caught me
                                         wiping my nose on the tablecloth,
                  she just winked
                                 and handed me a napkin
        (Modess, for those trying times of the month),
             soft,
               so soft,
      I was
              falling
                   down
                       to see Oprah
               my tongue fattened on
           bars,
               cars,
                  and oh Sweet Jesus, girl,
         stars.
      I woke two days later
          on a ward filled with women
               in a city I couldn’t remember visiting.
      Beyond the mesh window, the sky was gray
           and cloudy, my skin winter pale
                when I pulled up my gown and examined
      my belly, lonely and flat,
           a bruise spreading my hip
                 like the bite of an angel.

      from #56 - Summer 2017

      Cinthia Ritchie

      “I’ve struggled with depression most of my life, have been hospitalized twice, used to take a slew of pills but now train and run ultra-marathons (and oh, that runner’s high!). I see the world differently; I have no desire to see it as it is, thank you very much. I love/seek/hotly desire the sexy spaces between words, I embrace pauses, roll my tongue over periods and oh, how it lingers on semi-colons! I will never be normal. There is something wrong with my head; there’s something right with my head; there’s something different with my head. My poems are my ‘normal.’ They’re my stabilizing factor, my Prozac-without-funding-the-pockets-of-big-pharm-America, my taste of what it must feel like to wake each day unburdened by the thoughts, obsessions, and darkness inside one’s own mind. And may I be blunt here? I love words more than I love most people.”

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