Kate Daniels: Detox
So she wouldn’t judge, she practiced empathy,
sitting for months in full lotus, palms open, thumb
and forefinger touching to make a small circle
she could empty her thoughts inside until emptiness
was all that filled her. To complete the ritual
she purified her body, deleting the nightly glass
of Spanish red she enjoyed sipping while slicing
crudités for dinner. Her medications – all
prescribed – were next: the benzodiazapene
she seldom took, the anti-depressant she swallowed
every day. It surprised her – how long they took
exiting her body, and how reluctant they were
to leave, and how they bothered her for weeks,
waking her at night, throbbing down the long
spans of muscles in her quadriceps and gastrocnemius,
complaining as her system forced them out.
It was harder than she’d thought – giving up
her little pleasures, taking the shine off things
she had gotten used to polishing up at the end
of the day to anesthetize their prick… Still
it wasn’t all that difficult to shed those habits,
and she barely noticed any difference until
she saw him in the detox unit behind glass,
lined up on a bench with all the other addicts
and the drunks. They looked like convicts
sitting side by side, with their laceless sneakers
and their beltless pants, locked in and shackled
to BP monitors and IV drips.
She was clean herself by then. So nothing
softened the blow or diluted the force of awful
feelings that slammed up inside her chest
when she saw that sight. She had to take it
raw because she couldn’t rush home anymore
(as she would have done before) to calm herself
with a soothing dose of zoloft and merlot.
Copyright 2018 Kate Daniels. From In the Months of My Son’s Recovery by Kate Daniels. Forthcoming from LSU Press (2019)
Vox Populi 