It turns out, if a person takes 
all the anti-anxiety pills at once,
anxiety disappears forever.
Everything disappears forever.

My mother was the age I am now.
I, a child. All gets crushed 
beneath the weight of a single fact.
I don’t remember leaving the house. 
Don’t remember packing my clothes,
my guitar, my baseball cards.
Her Stephen King novels, which I’d read 
with jittery relish because they trafficked
in experience with such blunt realism. 
Terrifying. Terrifying. Terrifying.
Life was like a Stephen King novel, 
where a child lives alone in a dilapidated house.
He senses someone else is there.
A dusky room where the TV’s always on.
The scent of beer cans, cigarettes,
and sweat. In reality, no one is there.

Flashes. My stepdad’s pickup truck, 
orange on the dead lawn. They had 
separated, and I was to live with him now.
Drop cloths, paint cans. Preparing to sell 
her house. We painted the bathroom dark,
milk-chocolate brown. 1990s brown.
I remember when the paint dried,
we flipped on the overhead light. 
The bathroom stayed black, 
like the inside of a cave. 
There was just one circle of light 
on the ceiling. Just a glimmer. 

I held to whatever light there was,
like a midnight sailor 
squinting at a star. 
Like an insect toward a fire.

Greg Sevik is a poet, translator, and English professor at the Community College of Baltimore County. His poems and translations have been published in the Big Windows Review, the Ekphrastic Review, Inventory, and elsewhere. His essays have appeared in such publications as the Emily Dickinson Journal and Style.