January, I spill my heart out to you.
the last time I met you I was rotting in my bed,
melting into my own skull. only flower-flavored
ice cream and mother sweetness brought me
back to the land of the living. do you remember?
I try so hard to forget. to move on. I’m afraid
I’ve never moved past a single thing in my life,
just grown around it—a tree continuing to sprout
from where its branches were cut. sometimes
it still smarts even though the skin has grown
over it. I’m phantom limbed, I’m still nightmaring.
these days, I can put all the hurt, all the hopeless,
in a little box and tuck it neat behind the couch.
I’m quite good at it. I soak up strangers’ sorrow
for a living. I guess I’m quite good at that, too.
my brother got me a quesadilla maker for
my birthday so now I’m 24 and I make quesadillas
all day for the fun of it. I’m experimenting with
good chicken-to-cheese ratios. January, it’s weird
to say that I’m 24 now when I was once 4
and 12 and 17 and 22 and holding hands with
anything that could kill me. it’s strange to be 24
when 23 was all growing pains and gripping
the edge of the sink and scream-howls and
scaring the shit out of my mother. January,
I’ve been thinking a lot about capital-T Trauma.
there’s a little girl inside my head who feels
loneliness blooming in her chest like a many-
daggered dahlia and I can’t quite look her
in the eye. I want to hug her but she just wants
to scream. I want to tell her everything is going
to be okay, but how can she believe me when,
for so long, it wasn’t? I guess I’m afraid that if
I start screaming, I might never stop. I guess I’m
afraid that if I say a good thing out loud, it’ll
cease to exist. and January, I’ve been holding
onto every good thing I have in a paper-white-
knuckled grip and whispering to them,
please stay with me. please don’t go.

Wanda Deglane is a poet and therapist from Arizona. She has written Melancholia (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021) and other books.