BETTER MOMENTS

by Joel Savishinsky

Federal regulators said Wednesday that they will begin penalizing nursing homes that give residents a false label of schizophrenia, a practice that many facilities have used to skirt restrictions on antipsychotic drugs, which can be especially dangerous for older people. —The New York Times, January 18, 2023. Photo: Yvonne Blakeney’s husband, David, a dementia patient, was diagnosed with schizophrenia shortly after arriving at a nursing home. Credit: Sean Rayford for The New York Times.

In my better moments, 
I know my head’s not 
right… but this is wrong.
 
There are dark caves inside my mouth, 
where their blind stupidity
is not my disability, 
spaces that enable me to
hide their pills inside my cheek, 
under my tongue, 
back in the recess behind 
my lower right molar. 
 
I am not dumb. 
I’ve read the text, 
and know the fate 
of those who’d fly 
over the cuckoo’s nest. 
I’ll sit right here and 
won’t take flight, but 
find refuge in a 
remnant of integrity.
 
In my better moments, 
I know my rights.

 
Joel Savishinsky, a retired professor of anthropology and gerontology, is the author of The Ends of Time: Life and Work in a Nursing Home and Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, both of which won the Gerontological Society of America’s book-of-the-year prize. His collection Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging, will be published by The Poetry Box in 2023.

DISPLACEMENT

by Erik Schwab

Graphic source: The Daily Plant.

It’s not that they’re screaming. It isn’t pain exactly,

in the market garden, these kohlrabis and cabbages,

these garlic scapes: it’s that they’re in shock. Harvest

is our word, theirs must be apocalypse. But another

word is anthropomorphize and someone told me

once I shouldn’t do it and I believed them and found

the stump of my root dunked in a washbasin and divested

of holy dirt. Now near the end of time

I wish medications were poems, I wish I were floating

over lakewater, skipping silver marbles instead of

saying the new things I say every reluctant day: I’m

on the mend, thanks, thanks, I’m grateful for the

prayer, for the sea urchin, for the red beetle, for

the cabinet of curiosities you sent and for the gig driver

who lost three family members while my heart was 

locked behind a thick pandemic door.

The right kind of time traveler would go twenty years back

and plant that tree, but we service-patched cyborgs

haul our untested upgrades in one direction only, toward

the gracious refusal, toward the retirement of connections, until

the building falls in the middle of the night, the slumbering tenants

dreaming of skydiving and waking to astonishment.

Erik Schwab lives in Seattle, WA. Last year he started writing poems for the first time since college, with the invaluable help of a weekly workshop at Community Building Art Works.