Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize Honorable Mention, selected by Heather Treseler
Forgiveness
Outside my therapist’s office, three men are planting ferns,
pruning bushes, cutting back the tangled vines
that twine across the building’s bricks, covering them in green,
and when I reach the door one of them has risen,
and nods his head, and it seems a nod that verges
on pity, as if he’s seeing
into the room I’ll enter to empty myself of grief
and wants to offer
one gesture before turning back to the roses,
a projection I should share
but never will. Inside, I settle
in the chair across from her, the woman
I see each week despite my fear of being seen.
Have you thought over,
she asks, what we talked about last time? She’s trying
to get me to forgive
myself. She wants to free me
of the song
I play over and over
in my mind, which governs
every part of me: nerves,
veins,
fingers,
ego.
I sing
myself my sins:
Clear, dry gin.
The man I loved (my roving
heart). The fringes
that I occupied. My father
in his hospital bed and I
too late. What severing
it must take to let this go.
And now she says, moving a little closer to the edge
of her chair, really seeing
me, or
wanting to, I had a patient once,
in a place far from here, who,
in the impenetrable fog
of her disorders, and guided by some sick version
of herself, killed her three little sons.
And when she came
to see me, after the fever
of her sin
had burned the memory to fine
dust, she didn’t even
know what she had done.
And I had to decide—do I
tell her what she did? And now an ambulance goes
by outside. I follow the noise
of its thin siren
dragging itself down the street until it’s gone,
and those men, I suppose, are finishing
their work, satisfied by having given
life to that garden, and the garden, content
in being tended to, everything green
and free
to bloom. She says:
I didn’t tell her.
The Meeting
The woman at the meeting told me
your disease will always be there
in your right ear telling you
to fuck it all up but in your left ear
is god telling you not to
and I thought oh great more voices
but let me back up
I was there
because my husband found
my fourth step inventory
and a fourth step inventory is where
you list whom you have harmed
and I had harmed him
but he didn’t know
until he read it
on a crumpled piece of paper
in my awful handwriting
but let me back up again
I was there because
I couldn’t stop drinking
and I couldn’t stop drinking
because I am clinically depressed
and because that one voice always won
and because I didn’t think I could live
any other way but to extinguish
every urge and pain and fear
before the light of day could expose
whatever truth I thought they held
and so I tried to tell the room
full of strangers what happened
but my voice kept cracking and
I felt my legs trembling in the metal chair
and I kept smashing my hands together
and then three women
surrounded me to stuff tissues in my palm
and give me their advice and I was surprised
because I’d only managed a few words really
and then the one—Sue—said the thing about the voices
and she said if he loves you
he will stay and he loves you doesn’t he
and before this you’re not guilty
and I loved her in that moment
I loved her gray eyes
and I loved her white t-shirt
and I loved her steady unwavering voice
and let me back up again
I was there because that is all I ever wanted—
for someone to see exactly
and entirely what I felt
and what I had done and to tell me
that it wasn’t my fault
that I was sick but that I could get better
and for that to come not from pity
but from absolute understanding
and thank god for that woman
and god forgive me everything
and god direct my thinking
and god be the voice in my left ear
and please speak to me
loudly enough and soon enough
to save me from returning
to the dark room of my suffering
Chelsea Bunn is the author of “Forgiveness” (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and a recipient of the Rita Dove Award in Poetry and the Academy of American Poets Catalina Páez & Seumas MacManus Prize. She earned her MFA in Poetry and her BA in English at Hunter College, and lives and teaches in New Mexico.