Left Behind

Left Behind

Yours was the most terrible medicine ever devised for our disease, 
and I have tried them all, in ones and twos and threes. And fours
and fives and sixes, toxic mixes, who knows what they’ll do?
You did the same, and none of them fixed you.

I have been shocked, I have been sedated. I have self-medicated. 
I took a drug that might have flayed me. It didn’t save me. 
But what you did remade me. Each day I dream 
of my own destruction I think of yours, that brutal 
introduction to the topic of survivorship, grim trip 
through anger, grief, recrimination, each bloody leaf 
of your Dantean tree another dose of medicine for me. 
You reduced my risk of death by slit wrist. 

Some people say it’s time to let you go (as if I could) 
but I swing low and have years of danger left to row:
the long slow drip of no, the crisp sharp pain of stop, 
the drain of not, meds that quit, “life events” that hit. 
And so I should take you every night 
with my hand-curated flight of pills, review the stills 
from your act and aftermath, the way you cracked me, 
racked me. I should live always in your death, 
swallowing your last and bitter breath. You left 
one day and taught me why I have to stay.

— Amy Isikoff Newell