Jessica Harman

THE SOUND OF THE WORD, “OLANZAPINE.”

1. Potent Pills

Strange desires are encapsulated in my Olanzapine tablets. They’re small

               but powerful, perfectly lozenge-like, a laboratory-made bliss

That’s designed to want to make me

               More like everyone else, less swallowtail and rainbow, less wildflower,

                              More politesse.

The Lily factory swallows me each time I take my dosages,

               Tasting the tartness of chalk in my mouth, the salt, the side-effects like

Chemical names that sound like complications,

               As if they would make me less of something and more of something.

It’s the cure. I swish their happiness

               Into me, and they mix with other pills that pull my mind towards gravitas.

[....]

Jessica Harman

2. The Three-Fold Structure Of The Brain Is Just Something I Read About

Triune

               And mythological for my three levels of being, my threefold

Mind—they say the reptilian is the earliest, and so prehistory

               Is a lizard sunning itself as

The gecko flicks its tongue at the dog curled up on the porch in the sun

               And then there is the higher

Part that invented God, or that lets us know who invented

               Us, perhaps. Invented us with stained glass, saltwater sunlight

Filtering through

               Images of saints among the bones of cathedrals round as our skulls.

[....]

Jessica Harman

3. Beautiful Colors

My hemispheres miscommunicate, making colors into more

               Than they are, as if red were really the ultimate blood,

And orange were those sweet evenings we spent peeling

               Tangerines down to their taste of late afternoon, and yellow

Was the sun dancing on the earth making it look like light

               Could breathe across things, and blue was that color we love

When mystery seems protected from us,

               Somehow, like twinkling stars.

And lapis and ruby were the colors of the cross,

               but green was the color we got when it was autumn,

And we were falling

               Back through summer towards the beginning of spring,

When we were looking forward to evenings of terraces full of dark-green moonlight.

               And white was the light in the morning,

[....]

Jessica Harman

When the world hurt our eyes with its heavy sunlight pressing us from all directions,

               And we felt like we were full of grace, and that lavender scent of

Wildflowers, mixing and dancing in the wind,

               And that wind still carried the wildness

Towards us even at the intersection of St. Denis and Mont-Royal, where maroon

               brought the whooshing of the subway station above ground,

Like a thin-sounding prayer. The neon smell of vermilion

               Cities, the blue call of the seagull over the wind scattering paper cups

Copyright © Jessica Harman. White Whale Review, issue 1.2