She rocks back and forth in the chair, her hips a fulcrum, her nail-bitten fingers dug deep into her long, bony thighs. She shows me a poem she has written about a motherless bird. It tilts its head back, crying for food under an empty sky.
When county funds are spent, they will send her to the state hospital As she speaks of watching her back in hell, she avoids my eye.
They have moved us from warehouses to prisons and homeless shelters they consign us to poverty for our illness yet we survive
Behind her head, a halo of steel mesh shines against the sun. She is the light we shut away, the future we squander. A social worker scolds me for listening to her: "You should worry about yourself, you know."
At night, I long to taste the air outside, let it chill me into consciousness. I stare at the stars in their measured brightness, in the mythic designs. By imposing a map upon the sky, we create constellations to guide us; while the bird tilts her head back in silence, her hungry eye fixed on the moon.
Joan Rizzo is a writer and mental health activist living with a bipolar disorder. Her poetry has appeared in The Awakenings Review and the National Catholic Reporter. She would like to dedicate her contribution to this issue of The Awakenings Review to the memory of her brother, Steven Rizzo, who took his own life twenty years ago.