HJM Barrie
Two Victorians kill themselves each day, mental health inquiry hears
About two Victorians take their own lives each day, with about half the people who killed themselves seeking help from health services in the six weeks before they died.
Less is Now
The hospital where you were born
was razed twenty years ago,
the land developed as a
shopping mall and condos.
Your parents have also passed on –
but not to provide shopping and living space
you hope.
.
The grammar school was shuttered,
the high school abandoned.
Changing demographics
then started in with its wrecking ball.
And, of course, there’s no point
in looking for the house you grew up in.
Something called Lakeland Estates
was built atop its bones.
.
The mom and pop shops
down Main Street
long ago succumbed to
the chain-stores rimming the town.
In fact, there no longer is a town.
It’s a commuter suburb
from its strip malls to its Park and Ride.
.
With no more family,
the person you were
exists only as a memory.
And even that is
fading with the years.
.
It’s nostalgia for now
and darkness in the days to come.
Your calendar’s almost complete.
.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Midwest Quarterly, Poetry East and North Dakota Quarterly with work upcoming in South Florida Poetry Journal, Hawaii Review and the Dunes Review.
i was in the night
.
in the calm of
vaporous street lights
gliding down the whorl of febonacci petals
i wandered then, my eyes to
the tired old streets joined with the neon
in her hair in the alley into the night, laughing
she was before me
and i seemed to see the fairly radiant
outline who once across my
distant dreams of childhood passed letting
her unclasped hands
open torrents of falling stars
rain down in a
sea of gentle fire
Young City
Massive piers vibrate with the cars
on Covington Bridge, commuting over natural stone
as soothing as a tomb lingering from the night.
I skim the shadows
near floating cafes where an occasional cook gazes out,
elbows on the railing, flipping a cigarette.
We pass with the slightest of nods.
.
Sun-lit glitter thrums along a rusted railroad trestle,
hums above imagined dinners neither of us could afford,
while Cincinnati vanishes into the rough corrugations
zoned commercial downstream.
.
The earth begins to heap into scattered clumps,
into mounds of materials, sand and aggregates, tanks
of petroleum from Ashland and Chevron, the conveyor belt
feeding dust into a cloud above a single, pickup truck.
.
Down City
.
Silt and grit
simmer in the pools speckled with flecks
of metal and globs of oil.
.
Water churns in a commerce of sunlight,
channeling earth organs, filtering wastes
through kidneys of spongy mud.
.
The city settles into sediments, layers into diluted
liquid dumps devoid of what I need or want,
so I row and row to win it back.
.
I make a seat.
I set a table below the swing of my arms,
my hands touching her hands.
.
Trees become glimpses, and then whispers.
.
Out City
.
A cluster of factories hidden in the haze,
the white-walled asphalt plants camouflaged in vapor.
.
At a confluence, I’m surrounded by rainbows of oil
swirling on the chocolate waters of the Great Miami River
.
yawning with its brown and dirty yellow tongue,
exhaling the fumes from a city’s sewage overflow, a storm
of purulent songs that even insects cannot hum.
.
The dark caverns of webbed branches are bent limp,
drooping into the murk of soggy roots sprung and wrung
above a long stretch of mud stench.
.
Unnamed things scatter on the surface
near a bloated carcass—a cow floating in the refuse,
rocking in blotches and humps.
.
And except for a mosquito
revving its wings past my ear, I hesitate to touch
any of it.
"I lost my precious brother to suicide in 2015, shattering and changing our lives forever" ....
'I’m disgusted': Q&A guest silences panel with powerful story
For close to two minutes, Krissi Grant rendered the panel and the studio completely silent. What followed was a powerful and essential discussion.
Two Victorians kill themselves each day, mental health inquiry hears
About
two Victorians take their own lives each day, with about half the
people who killed themselves seeking help from health services in the
six weeks before they died.
