Abstract My mother is armed with a pair of surgical scissors. She buys them at craft stores, online, or at the pharmacy. She prefers straight-bladed Mayo scissors, otherwise known as suture scissors, but if you ask her, I’m sure she’s got plenty of Metzenbaum or iris dissecting scissors laying around—and I mean really, just laying around. They’re everywhere. In her bathroom, between the sinks, you’ll nd cemented in the sediment of her daily hairspray ritual her primary scissor receptor: a rose-gold blown glass gravy bowl. Inside, the little scissor-soldiers lean up against the spout; their nger loops each a head peering, waiting for deployment. There’s a pair in the o ce and two by the replace, neatly laid atop a hand towel, which she taught me to fold in thirds, hotel-style. She transports them in her purse, her scissors, sealed tight inside a war-torn Ziplock bag. She carries them inside her makeup case, she stashes an emergency pair at work, she keeps her sharpest pair in the center console of her otherwise spotless car. She will whip out her scissors anytime she encounters an enemy—a loose thread, a lopsided bang, a hangnail—and claim her victory. Looped around her rearview is her stethoscope—mauve, monogrammed—and her RN hospital badge, now more than ten years inactive. The scissors came before her nursing career; the scissors persist. Leonard 1 Note From the Author the poems begin at the cutting o point: the snake, two headed, the umbilical cord tied with teeth the long femur of my tall cousin in the desert, his cactusbones totaled in a hit and run, his tracheotomy performed by casinolight, and behind the wheel was me, or someone very like me, not so very many years ago. these poems examine the speaker the way her favorite ob/gyn does, wearing gloves and announcing my hand is on your knee, now my hand is going to touch your thigh. these poems are lled with plot holes, as the poet’s greatest critic herself has noted, but in her defense, the poet spent most of her twenties letting white wine nights take her to task and she has not been fully therapized, baptized or hypnotized, yet, and yes, she has since soberized, but she feels it is her duty to disclose a con ict of interest in the poems: the Leonard 2 poet has, within the occasion of the past 3-5 years, been engaged in a meaningful and in fact a life-altering relationship with the substance at the center of these poems, and her writing on the matter is, without question, in uenced. though the poet works to address the aforementioned holes, none of the poems are about the hole in her favorite pair of jeans, just the one hole, under the left pocket; none of the poems address how she had gotten this working hole, how she used her apron to cover at least one of three red cheeks or how this hole had grown gave whole permission, gave her the bruises, the ngerprint snakes she drank to forget. Leonard 3 Introduction In a 2023 conference panel titled “Defying Tradition in Lyric Flash Creative Non ction,” former Poet Laureate of Kansas Denise Low spoke on the intertwining of poetry and lyric non ction. She bade those of us in attendance, myself included, to think about lyric ash non ction in poetry collections acting as an infusion of intertextuality through storytelling that, she argued, poetry does not alone give. She told us that the backstory of the poem, when we’ve all gathered together to hear it read aloud by its author, gives new vivacity, understanding, and, as Low said, a narrative ash to accompany poems “add[s] other voices as exemplary, reifying agents” (Gibson et al 4). Low suggested that lyric ash CNF can ll white space otherwise left unharvested by individual poems in a collection and might work to bring connective tissue together more successfully. As she spoke, a Beatles lyric came to my mind—“Fixing a hole where the rain gets in.” “Fixing A Hole,” from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, came under re after its 1967 release when audiences took it for a heroin ballad—accusations to which Paul McCartney gave response in The Observer in November of that year by saying: “If you’re a junky sitting in a room fixing a hole then that’s what it will mean to you, but when I wrote it I meant if there’s a crack or the room is uncolourful, then I’ll paint it” (Aldridge 32). I have xed many a hole. Yes, even those kinds of holes. According to Denise Low, one of the ways I might x a hole is with story. The poems I write always have a story—and poems should always have a story, of some sort, I think. At this same panel, Low discussed with the other participants, writers April Gibson, Kathryn Kysar, and Sun Yung Shin, the idea of a “bruise” in a lyric essay—the growing, pulsing, painful, strange, or fading purple detail that attracts a poet's eye to a particular image. This is a feature that Leonard 4 poetry and ash creative non ction have in common; as Dinty W. Moore de nes it in his craft essay “Of Fire and Ice,” the creative ash non ction genre, already a hybrid genre by its own right, [I]s marked by the distinct, often peculiar, voice and sensibilities of the author and [...] examine[s] the deeply human—and often unanswerable—questions that concern all serious art. The style might range from intellectual to somber to humorous to playful, and the subject matter might be travel, the inscrutability of human behavior, or a moth on a window ledge, but the work itself is individual, intimate, exploratory, and carefully crafted using metaphor, sensory language, and precise detail. (Moore 14) What the panelists were suggesting, however, was something even more hybrid than this: a hybrid lyrical prose poetic memoir. If you asked me what I’m up to with this project, it is something like that mouthful. But, it feels a lot less technical than that. Part of my resistance to categorize this writing as such, or as anything, really, is because of the hybrid genre’s integral spirit of resistance. As Gregory Orr muses in “Writeable Radiance: Notes on the Hybrid of Lyric and Prose,” the dilemma within hybrid forms of poetic memoir is that “A part of the lyric temperament seeks to rise up out of the body and out of time—the classical de nition of ecstasy. Poets inclined to such ‘lyric longing’ often use metaphor and imagination to rise up. [...] Lyric wants to go vertical, whereas prose seems to me strongest when it ows con dently with the horizontal, the time-bound particulars of observed action and interaction” (Orr 149). There is a delicate balance to be had between the two, poetry and prose; in the case of a hybrid project like this, the one necessitates the other—but does not shadow, excuse, or even quite explain the other. “Fixing a hole where the rain gets in” might stop the house from ooding, Leonard 5 but there is always rain, there on the roof, rolling down the windows, the smell of it mixing with the old heater, now kicking on. When it rains, the color of it is everywhere. At the panel, poet April Gibson, author of Automation, reminded us that ash as a form can work in the service of fragmented memory, of speaking between lines, as a trauma response, and as a way of telling parts of a story when we don’t know yet how to tell the whole heavy thing (Gibson et al). Orr agrees: “The violent and chaotic experiences of my early life were especially daunting when I tried to convey them in straightforward prose” (Orr 148). He writes that he was “reluctant” to record the story of his young life, which had been touched by death, addiction, poverty and persecution, “because I doubted the power of prose to stabilize these events and to discover meaning in them” (Orr 149). Poetry relies on a kind of untelling, in what Ben Lerner calls “the desire to get beyond the nite and the historical—the human world of violence and di erence—and to reach the transcendent or divine” (Lerner 8). This is especially true in image driven poetry, where we hope to distill a mansion-sized idea into something salient, tiny, and potent: a tincture at home on the apothecary’s shelf. Sometimes, this image distillation is right for the poem, but I know that sometimes I do it by default, out of habit, or out of my custom of turning a molasses-thick story into rum, shooting it, and hoping that as little of the image as possible will make an ugly return. There are parts of my story I am not ready to tell. I cannot x every hole. Leonard 6 Literature Review I am an alcoholic. I am a writer and I am an alcoholic—very original, I know. I am a writer and I am an alcoholic and I cannot write about it, though I keep trying. Nearly two years ago, as of this writing, I quit drinking. I wish there was more to say about it. I wish there was a story to tell, a rock bottom where I could pitch my ag, claim my territory on the map of life-changing moments of reckoning. There isn’t one, not really. I can’t even remember the day I de nitively quit. I remember something about setting out for twenty-eight days, then fucking that up, and then trying again, and then again, and then again. I used to train for running track this way with my father every other weekend at Davis High School after dusk, rocking forward on the balls of my feet and digging my spikes into red turf, practicing launching up from the blocks at the sound of an old toy sheri 's pistol—pop, again, pop, again, pop, again. The truth is that, as a poet, I almost never see narrative out in the wild, or spot glimpses of straightforward story arcs through the trees. I write rhizomatic; if my words were paint I’d pour them from ladders ten-feet tall. I never want to tell you exactly what I’m up to. When I was a girl, I went through the usual secret-keeping phase sometime around my eleventh birthday, when I began intensive and sometimes kleptomaniacal candle collecting. Candles of any kind were magically appealing to me, but something about little fake ickering tea light candles were especially enchanting. Little tiny on/o switches. Little tiny ames. Some of them painted, some of them tall—some of them even dripping with fake wax. I got my rst tealight candle that summer at a vigil. After that, I gathered every candle my mother had in junk drawers and Christmas boxes, and I did the same when I visited my grandmothers’ houses. Candles that belonged to the parents of my friends were not, by their nature, Leonard 7 immune to my quick ngers. I did this for a number of years. I was stashing them in the shed out back of the little blue house we rented next to the church, holding tealight ceremonies and performing late-night re-hazard summonings. When my mother would ask as to why I was spending so much time in the shed—there’s no light in there! it’s just for storage!—I never wanted to tell her what I was up to. I am in the habit of hiding bad habits, and I always have been. I am writing this because one day I came home from work and lit a candle, wine already in hand, and remembered that vigil, the way the white tea lights seemed virginal in a stranger's hands, innocent in comparison to real re—the re I now held in my hands, invited into my home. I remembered the night I left all the real candles burning in the shed and even though it didn’t cause any real damage my secret was revealed and I thought about the way even a splash of alcohol stored in that shed that night would have caused it to catch re and burn the whole thing down and take with it the little blue rental house, the old chipping fence, and the church next door, for good measure. Maybe that day, lighting that candle, was the day I quit and meant it. Rhizomatic writing, where I believe my prose writing and poetry writing converge, has allowed me to approach the tender topic of my alcoholism—albeit quietly, reproachfully, and with a ten-foot stick. This is perhaps due in part to my perpetual fear that my addiction is a bull, big and blind, and these twirly words here might attract his attention. I’ve set out on a project of recovery that will last a lifetime. Because I was once in active alcoholism, alcoholism planted itself into my mothering, my education, my relationships. That’s the thing about alcohol; it can leave the blood but remain embedded in the veins. * Leonard 8 I am not the only poet to be fascinated by veins, by tree roots and their branches, by fungal networks, by waterways seen from airplanes and by our mothers milk ducts—everything branching out, touching each other, carving, reaching. This is the structure of the rhizome in its simplest of terms; philosophically speaking, it is much more complicated than this. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari de ne through example in their co-authored text, A Thousand Plateaus, writing: The wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else—with the wind, an animal, human beings (and there is also an aspect under which animals themselves form rhizomes, as do people, etc.) [...] Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a rst line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of ight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency. (Deleuze and Guattari 11) Rhizomatic writing relies on the same rhizomal mechanics of nature: by owing in streams of connected logics, expressed ideas can be picked up across divergent streams, in trickling creek ows or in energetic waterfalls—whatever suits its survival best. Something connects here, conjuncts there, nds life, runs with it. It is in opposition to arboreal writing—that is, the straightforward, the linear, the ol’ traditional tree trunk of text. The cyclical and reciprocal structure of the rhizome in the natural world can, of course, be interrupted—new growth, o shoots, death. For Deleuze and Guattari, this is a natural part of rhizomatic writing, as dead or changed material in uences the parent material, helping Leonard 9 it grow and survive, and vice versa. In their metaphoric dichotomy, a trunk can be felled, diseased, or otherwise die; it can grow only in one direction and can only reach one height, or convey one meaning. Breaking beyond that boundary is essential in rhizomatic writing; so essential, in fact, that the authors encourage a change in state of mind to aid in shaking up the arboreal, linear-patterned way of thinking, even recommending amidst the commandments listed above, “Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us” (Deleuze and Guattari 11). Triumphant! Irruption! What jubilant sounds! Irruption, referring to a sudden or dramatic spike in animal populations in a particular area, and usually where they are not gathered year-round, is a mighty curious word choice here. It is not interruption, a much more familiar and expected word, and the word a lazy eye like mine might see in that phrase at rst skim. No, it is irruption, as in: an irruption of evening grosbeaks, of tourists at my late grandfather’s favorite burger joint in Carpinteria, California. They are right about drunkenness, about its irruptive qualities—this, of course, is why I drank to begin with. UCLA Ph.D. candidate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Ben Tonelli traces dramatic irruptive bird migrations across the United States, tracking the “boom-bust” economy of food source availability and suitable habitat among avian populations, which is largely in uenced by human behavior and climate change. These migrations have consequences; as Tonelli writes, under environmental pressure to expand their range and migrate to new areas, birds are bioweapons: “Many [...] impactful emerging and chronic infectious pathogens in the United States are found in migratory bird populations, including Avian In uenza, West Nile virus, Lyme disease, and Salmonellosis” (Tonelli 1). He argues that the increased ability and need for avian species to make dramatic irruptive migrations “ha[s] the potential to radically alter the disease landscape of particular regions and spread Leonard 10 pathogens that drive epidemics of zoonotic diseases across continental scales” (Tonelli 2). Usually, in writings about sobriety, the doom and gloom eventually make an appearance. My drunkenness was a triumphant irruption of the plant in me—it succeeded, took root, fed hungrily, warmed its feathers, left disease. I think Deleuze and Guattari meant this harmlessly, meant to imply an irruption of painted ladies to Burbank, for example, or miniskirts donated to the local Deseret Industries in the dead of winter. Vacation-style irruption, surprising irruption, shock-to-the-system irruption. This is the irruptive capacity of getting sober, too—electric style, whole-new-man style, I’m-a-space-invader-experiencing-Earth-for-the- rst-time-ever style. The kind of irruption that makes you think, hey, maybe I’d like to get out to Pamplona sometime, see the bulls run. * Using elements of rhizomatic and psychogeographic writing, W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn served as an exemplary model for the type of writing I wanted to undertake with this project. The Rings of Saturn—two parts travelog, one part ction, three parts meditative non ction, mix in any order, experiment with recipe as needed, wonder at the swirl cake—is deeply connected to the environment as the speaker-narrator navigates a memory of a walk once taken through Su olk. The local becomes a nexus from which the narrator can leap through time and space and genre, and allows the narrator to observe each subject as the subject demands, rather than as the bounds of genre of form traditionally demand. Sebald’s auto ctional speaker ruminates on the constellative relationships between history and memory and place; we follow him along footpaths in the English countryside like they are neural networks. The speaker in Rings is profoundly interesting to me—mostly due to his profound absence. He touches base, now and again, to bring us back from his telling of the histories of Leonard 11 Empress Dowager Tzu-hsi or Thomas Browne or Chateubriand, but he, personally, is majorly absent. He is mostly pondering outside of himself, remembering, reconstructing and observing from afar how slight, truly, the borders are between the personal and the interpersonal, the ower and the garden—he tells us, looking out the window of a small plane, that all of humanity, and by extension, all of existence itself, is “tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine” (Sebald 91). He brie y recounts an accident which has left him “in a state of almost total immobility” (Sebald 3), and it is in hospital that the speaker begins writing the memory of the pilgrimage that serves as a loose structure throughout the work. That memory—that all memory, that life writ large is eeting—is evidenced by the consistent destabilization of expected plot or narrative arc, and by the speaker, overwhelmed by the vast interconnectedness and by the inherent transience of both people and place, is paralyzed from connecting directly with it. At one point, Sebald’s speaker describes walking around Dunwich Heath and the surrounding area; here he’s telling us a way of writing. He is lost, or, as he describes it, “Lost in the thoughts that went round in my head incessantly, and numbed by this crazed owering” (Sebald 171), walking down paths of interest and furthering his confusion. He says: If one obeyed one's instincts, the path would sooner or later diverge further and further from the goal one was aiming to reach. Simply walking straight ahead cross-country was out of the question on account of the heather, which was woody and knee-deep, so that I had no choice but to keep to the crooked sandy tracks and to make mental notes of even the least signi cant features, even the slightest shift in perspective. (Sebald 172) Leonard 12 Sebald is doing just this, in his work—obeying instinct and avoiding the heather, the direct path. Later in the work, Sebald’s narrator considers this more directly: “But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight” (Sebald 255). The fragmented yet uid procession of memory, its construction and its unavoidable reconstruction in the brain over time, the way it is always in motion, always already going, is a large factor in the work I have written for this project. I set out to talk about the standard set of things: the process of recovery, the moments of clarity, the things I failed at and the things I accomplished. At rst, it seemed like the fuel would be endless; like I could write from the explosively ecstatic newly sober perspective forever. But, like in all habitats, adjustments and adaptations to the dramatic irruption of sobriety are eventually made. Things become regular, and then hard, again. Heather begins to grow over recovery, over clarity, over failures and successes. I am shooed to sandy paths by the brambles in my brain—I am left writing from the o shoots, from sheds with dangerously hot doorknobs, from the track where I ran in endless red rings. I am writing in spurts of memory, of one child who was very much wild and of another who was very much disciplined, both children existing at the same time and in the same body. I am writing because both of those children grew up and became alcoholics, and saw what they saw, and did what they did. I am writing because somewhere, within me, the one is still holding out hope the other will fail. Fragmented memory runs throughout this project; in fact, this project seems to demand it. There are true blanks in mine, like chunks of deleted code, and memories which I can only see from a great distance, as if from the window of an airplane. Piecing my story Leonard 13 together was not as easy as plugging in a formula; instead, I have had to give in to following the rhizomatic path of memory, especially memory of trauma, and then retroactively analyze them, sort them, make sense of their yew mazes. Sebald’s speaker tells us, “And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show a ection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past” (Sebald 255). This project is the ordering of a disordered brain—it is the examination of the writer by the writer, the one side of her wild, the other disciplined. * In an interview with Peter Mishler for LitHub, Sandra Simonds discusses the genesis of the form in her 2022 book, Triptychs, saying that her interest in experimenting with short lines led her to ask for a roll of receipt paper while out shopping (Simonds LitHub). She says that composing on the receipt paper and setting a timer for thirty minutes provided her with constraint; I know exactly what she means. On the nal day of my pregnancy, I worked the closing shift in the Brass Plum department at Nordstrom, marking out my contractions on one long thermal receipt slip between blanket scarf and jegging sales. There is only so much receipt paper, only so many contractions, before time runs out. Triptychs, composed in three columns, is as expansive as it is constrained; every poem is three side by side poems, every beginning and ending is in triplicate. In the poem “Dollar Tree Poiesis,” the outcome of such restraint is made evident in these lines, which begin with an apology and barrel roll through to the second poem-within-a-poem’s close: hello I'm so sorry Leonard 14 paper that can't grow any longer, can't unroll, paper that can't go on longer, can't unroll, or ring up any new characters, ideas, ngers, beep beep the story halts I look through plate glass, light the tip of the frankincense for now it is spring If I have indulged too much in signs If I have gone too far If the sonic disturbances were too elongated mea culpa If I subtracted mea culpa If my gestures If my voice (Simonds Triptychs 38) We see in this poem an expression of uncertainty, which is ampli ed by Simonds use of ellipsis in the nal lines; an uncertainty of the self, the future, the story. What the form Simonds adopts does, despite seeming limited, is open up each line to limitless and expansive experiences—so many that, as the speaker above confesses, they both can and cannot be contained in the pages. As Simonds said to Mishler, “The form was a good way to capture the ow of time, di cult aspects of narrativity, stream of consciousness, how reality or realities can be joined or unjoined through diction, space, simultaneity” (Simonds LitHub). As I began work on this project, I kept this idea in mind, which led me to house many poems together, delete their individual titles, and let them blend. I too am uncertain; never sure which part of the story I’m telling through my poems, never sure where I stand in relation to them. Leonard 15 Simonds acknowledges that, in Triptychs, “All the poems sort of fail and succeed at capturing something of the reality of experience (for me)—the momentum, the ow, the incompleteness is part of the project. I mean this project fully understands its lack, which is deeply embedded in the form” (Simonds LitHub). Throughout my project, I have seen and acknowledged a similar incompleteness, and have worked to embrace it, to let the fragmentary determine as much as the complete. In “Makeup Ointment Pollen,” Simonds captures the spirit of her poems: “and everything I write / seems to be a goodbye / to the little things / I believed were what / made the place bearable—” (Simonds Triptychs 61). This stanza provided me with the battle cry I marched into this project with: each poem serves as a farewell to a feeling, a memory, a person—just as much as it serves as a farewell to alcohol. Perhaps more predominantly in uential to this project is Simonds’ 2018 Orlando. Split into two epic poems, “Orlando” and “Demon Spring,” the collection is a telling and retelling of a tumultuous a air, which brings with it the telling of more tumult, past traumas, and abusive relationships. There is not one story in Orlando but many, and the same goes for speakers. Simonds exists in many dimensions throughout, reaching out from teenage diaries, the present moment, and from memory, “trying to turn time into its pathological negation” and “force history to confront / the inner narration of abuse, so the outer narration expresses this intense, lyric grief” (Simonds Orlando 10). In an interview with Jon Riccio, Simonds muses: I wanted to write a book that connected the past, the present, and the possibility of a future [...]. Because trauma has a way of fracturing narrative, is often marked by dissociation, composed of so much time and space where there is no story, or there is a story but no one believes the story, Orlando was a feminist way of challenging that. (Simonds Poetry Center) Leonard 16 This motif of fragmentation is connected throughout Orlando by the evolving ideas of fantasy and the real, of familiar territory trodden and of the unknown. It is a work of “double dream, double world, double story, Oh to be the poor double song / breaking through the double fantasy of itself” (Simonds Orlando 36). This idea of doubling echoes throughout my project, especially as I consider where the two halves of myself, the sober and the alcoholic, meet. In creating the poems throughout the “Methodology” section of this project, I also found myself drawn to her use of tercets, especially for longer storytelling poems, and to her chopped up prose poems: “[Manage your house] [Manage your kids] / [Manage your student loans] [Manage to write poems] [Manage] [Manage]” (Simonds Orlando 52). Although the tercet structure is broken at the end of “Orlando” and “Demon Spring” uses many forms, these two in particular were interesting to me for the way they spoke to one another. The epic in tercets gives the work a sense of forward, continued motion, while also breaking that momentum into stanzas that can be just as isolated from their position as they are connected to it. The bracketed prose poems work in a similar fashion, but deliver the disconnection and fragmentation on a smaller, more immediate scale. These forms mirror the disorientation, disruptiveness, and disconnection associated with trauma, and led to my use of similar constructions in my own narrative. Leonard 17 Methodology for Sandra Simonds fig 1 we were step tip toe sipping permissions from novelty asks you shared a blue moon with my father waterside, in summer i was still lactating at night, though we had weaned the boy weeks ago we threw the milk-alcohol test strips in the trash and then our binding began tied to redrocks, beholden and trashed, gnashing our teeth together in pink prophecies we had bathed in new water and emerged unclean, lord save the boy, leave us for slaughter. Leonard 18 fig 2 sometime, during the massacre, wherein i found myself sleepless, smokeworn, and weary, wherein i vomited into automatic toilets that boomeranged back at me, more than once, wherein i swallowed aming snakes to entertain my audience, to see their black pupils grow by relight just before i choked it in my throat wherein i googled every night: hangovernauseahangoverheadacheshangoversleeplessnesshangoverdiarrheahangoverpanicattackshango verdepressionhelpmeicannotleavemybedhangovercureshangovercuresthatarenotfoodhowtoplaywithki dswhenyouaresickhowtorecoverfromanightofharddrinkinghowtorecoverhowtorecoverhowtorecover wherein i slept for six days and for six nights wherein within me there cried a butter y, speaking in tongues or a child, or a congress, or a cow giving milk, or my mother, wherein, on some seventh day, i woke up thinking about cold cabbage leaves old wives remedies for milksore breasts Leonard 19 fig 3 no thanks/i drank all mine/actually/ill have a coke/actually/id be happy to drive us home/no/thank you/im abstaining/for my health/im/actually/not much of a drinker/im making a political statement about britney spears/about my organs/im fasting on account of the ocelot/who is endangered/im still coming o of shrooms/im mourning the death of john lennon/im not a drinker/no thanks/the last time i drank/i got like/really sick/for real/im doing it for jodie/im doing a social experiment/for a vlog/ a space-opera screenplay/a vape pen commercial/its all very nebulous/im doing a thing from goop/no/thanks/im doing intensive hair therapy/for my split ends/im actually big into spirituality these days/i took a quiz on buzzfeed/it told me i was a poet/it told me to do what poets do/so/im learning to levitate/and this requires focus/im not/actually/drinking/im not drinking/im/actually/not drinking/im/actually/bloodthick in addictive personality disorders/im actually an alcoholic/so/if you don’t mind/ill just head home/ill slip out the back and ill lock up light/so/that you never notice me leaving/blowing silent kisses at your storm door/ Leonard 20 fig 4 to address the gs growing low, covering the lovers, who are rapt gures sketched in kid-crayon hard lines, dark marks on the page pulled hair in gurative clumps down literal drains gs are a seasonal fruit ripe syrup esh bring you luck, a ghting chance ghting words purple skin, waxen canopies of curls, of naked knowledge, of grandmother’s recipe for g jam, ruined gured it would end like this, in the garden hidden in gments in roseweeping garden shade Leonard 21 fig 5 wherein while i write these poems my phone buzzes to tell me : stay cozy, we’ll bring the booze wherein now i must confess to delivery apps : i am an alcoholic and would you please eat nails wherein while i can laugh still i want i want i want milkweeds and monarchs and i want to deliver gardenfuls, whole cabbage patches and nurse them pure Leonard 22 fig 6 by the autocorrect way, my son is given a new name: my love, long for mylo, did my love go to daycare? did my love make it home? did the software know, i wonder, that it took me three days and three nights of knowing the boy before i named him, that i had a list of three names on a whiteboard in the maternity ward and each night i erased one name at midnight, including the third, because i then believed it was impossible to name anything so unknown. his teacher once sent me an email, my love is wandering the hallways and says that he is in mourning, could you come pick him up? on the way home, he tearfully tells me that the death of his gold sh did not go unnoticed, and i realize that i could have done a much better job teaching him about death, and that i feel guilty; i hated that gold sh and i was glad to see it go. on the rst day, i eliminated the name which least t the mole on his head, then circled around by doctors, drawn ‘round with permanent ink, just in case, a big bullseye on his bald head Leonard 23 now made invisible by hair and made tiny by his grown in teeth, his hands, his eyes. the fall of the gold sh’s dying was the same fall in which i got sober, but saying it this way doesn’t quite do justice to the fall it was: a breakneck fall with bad times and mourning. i am so happy for you and happy for my love that you got sober. it feels celebratory and it feels terrible and i don’t know how else to say it. i nixed the second name after a night nurse visited and taught me how to breastfeed, how to cup with ngers in the shape of a c and squeeze and i remember how much it hurt, how my milk ran pink from split skin and how i spent the whole night wondering if i was ever feeding him, or if i was just poisoning him with my blood and this is how i came upon the decision to take a family name out of the running. on the third Leonard 24 night, i crossed o the remaining name as a matter of taste and wrote in that which became my love, my love. getting sober, getting clean, going shepherd, going aa, giving it up, giving it a name is never going to be easy, but, like the night nurse said, as she helped pack our bags, you had better name this baby now— a hungry baby can be fed, but a nameless baby can’t be called for dinner. Leonard 25 Findings I thought about cutting my hair today. There used to be other text here. I cut that instead. I thought about what it would feel like to see it all go, this hair, to pull it up into its last ponytail and behead it at the band. I have been keeping it like old lace for some time, nding again the old childhood curls in it, letting it grow, avoiding heat. Some of this hair has been through some tough shit. In the rst six months of my sobriety, I lost thirty pounds. Another twenty followed suit in the months thereafter, though a little slower. My hair grew long, my roots grew out. One of my favorite drunk activities was trying something new, DIY style, with my hair. Bangs, dyes, extensions, bleach. This was a signi cantly easier habit to drop; when I quit drinking, the urge to “ x” the way I looked faded. My skin cleared. I washed my face with water and it glowed like I’d been using a lifetime’s worth of premier Korean skincare lines. This felt fantastic and liberating. I wanted to tell everyone in the world about going sober. I wanted everyone to feel the way I felt, I wanted everyone to scream sing to Beyoncé’s “***Flawless” on their morning commute—“I woke up like this!”—and mean it. This is called “pink cloud” syndrome. It is the honeymoon phase of addiction recovery: pink clouding includes feelings of euphoria, positivity toward the aspect of recovery, and of nally having found peace. This ends. The most dangerous part of pink cloud syndrome is when it ends. If you are a icted, this ebb in optimism brings high risk of relapse. Ten pounds nd their way back, then another ve. Your period comes, bringing a fresh patch of chin pimples, and one of them is so deep you swear you can feel it Leonard 26 reaching all the way for your throat. You go about the business of your regular life, going to regular jobs, seeing regular friends, keeping regular relationships. You are in charge of maintaining those—no hangover rainchecks, no pseudo-intimacy from drunkenness. You wake up one morning and want all of your hair gone, want to cut and cut and cut until something feels new again. The pink desaturates. You have changed, but most of you is the same. The part of you that sees in greyscale still exists and demands its pound of esh. You are left with the task of retraining yourself to see pink without any help, without the aid of alcohol or clouded early-sobriety vision. You made the big decision to quit and let that joyous tsunami take you, but there is wreckage—wreckage and shrapnel of every size that you will have to decide to deal with every day, little by little. This is when the work begins. The text I deleted here was about my mother, about her life-long mental illness she actively refuses to treat. I wanted to write about her, because I always want to write about her. She is one of those Great Characters, larger than life, and awed. I set out to write her story, and mine by extension, both haunted and inspired by her suture scissor collection. I saw two kinds of cutting going on—the excision of alcohol from my life, and the kind of cutting my mother does. She uses her scissors to cut away loose and necrotic skin building on her hands and feet. She has been cutting at her skin for so long it forms in wide white elds on her feet, ready for harvest. She cuts away calluses and hangnails, and then she trims the tender esh surrounding them, pruning. She peels upwards in long sheaths of tough and mottled skin, and slices it at the root. I have watched her so groom—fascinated, disgusted—all of my life. I thought about using this as a lens to examine my own disordered motherhood. I thought that if I was going to write this troubled truth of being an alcoholic, I would treat her troubled truth with the same eye. I wrote this section rst, this tell-all about my Leonard 27 mother, and then didn’t look at it again for months. It got copied and pasted around this project, waiting for more work, waiting to be developed. Her story is gigantic—a whole network of ex-husbands, estranged sons, successful businesses and failed reconciliations make up her life. It is di cult to map; maybe even impossible. It’s too big. This is how I found myself focusing on the tiny, the everyday, the little scissors she keeps. * Leonard 28 Archive no 1 this is a suicide ballad a song for falling in love so many times it kills you forgive me father: my only memory is the ambulant light leaving the driveway & sometimes i pray i forget that, too. Leonard 29 no 2 this is an ode to lady brett ashley, bathtub queen, androgynous and forever unclean lady brett, in your parisian clawfoot washing your hair, your armpits, i wonder if you, like matisse’s ladies were blooming from every crook or whether you had a gillette yet; i think of you like a snowglobe and i’d like to shake your waterhome see your razorsnow smell your rosewater, yellowed i loved you when i met you because you fucked, absolutely you drank you were miserable you were never alone you drew hot hot baths to get clean when i studied you the professor said lady brett is in the bath because she is adulterated because she is corrupt lady, baby, i never felt that way, you took hot hot baths because of loneliness, i think in the water you felt your lover, dead of dysentery, water hands on your hips hungered for him, insatiable steam your soldier marching down the drain your towel sucking him up o lady, not damn good looking, not there o brett, babe newborn from the bath pink skinned wailing for the milk of pleasure. Leonard 30 no 3 this is an elegy to bathtubs and to marriages, to my mother and father’s, whose ended one summer in two bathtubs, the both of them practitioners of chaos magick, divining my father’s blood in ankleweights, wristrivers. my mother was lost in a city of gridlock ritual she says she felt the water call her by her temple name beckon her to knock the pinkest door and baptize herself in stranger’s tubwater. Leonard 31 no 4 for Kim Dower mom’s eclipse was like a spaceship, the envy of my friends when we’d pull up to school, stereo loud, charcoal glitterpaint re ecting galaxies against snowfall. this was surprising to me: i greeneyed their minivans, my rubberbooted friends stepping out of sliding doors like all the rocketships of my own imagination. these were the star crunch years, the dunked corn dog years, the years i spent collecting chevron cars, the years we lived in the eclipse like a covered wagon, like we were our own pioneer ancestors making pilgrimage to market in a two door moonroofed mitsubishi, here and there pitstopping on the arterial 15 into los angeles. in scipio we’d see the petting zoo, one brave llama approaching the gate, in beaver i’d beg to stop on account of my bladder; i’d really be on the lookout for a replacement rudy ragtop or a new sally schoolbus. in st. george we’d see the family, in las vegas too. i think i fell in love with cigarettes in the casinos at treasure island, or maybe at the luxor. i think i fell asleep to rush limbaugh every night. i always thought i saw cat mountain in the mojave dunes when mom pointed it out, but i admit: i could never make out the mythical cronese cat in the sand. sometimes i imagined we were bankrobbers, we were runaways, we were boxcar children or ma and blind mary. in l.a. we were lush in street corn eaten curbside and we were touching everything and hearing everything and mom reigned here as ladyjudge, thick in lingual pacts of packs, runs, reams and trucks. here the sun shined, here our hair curled and our skin heliotroped. so maybe it was true, then— we were space invaders in that midnight eclipse, returning from interplanetary travel to touch down pink lakeside, home another pitstop along our milky way road, starring together in blinding Leonard 32 beams of light, wearing prairie dresses and calico prints throughout the entire iridescent desert galaxy. Leonard 33 no 5 dear lover, whoever you are, these are the reasons i cannot marry you: i. because when i drive, i want to make every dangerously delicious left turn, i want permission to squeeze into every alleyway, and i want to take every exit—or the very last one. ii. because the rst thing i thought about when i took my newborn home in the car was what would happen if i had stopped driving, just for a second, and let the car leave the pavement, launch o the big hill on the road from the hospital and hurl us from it like expletives into the valley below, stranding the two of us, me and the little thing i knew nothing about, both of us watching the highway and the trains and the river pass by, uncaring. iii. because my mother drove a hunter green cadillac deville she called “the boat,” which she rammed into my father’s car in a k-mart parking lot; because my mother stabbed a fork through my father’s hand; because my mother hired a muralist to paint our family in our entryway and feature her descending, angelic, from a mythic waterfall; because my mother released every pet she brought home, singing “ y, be free!” at the glass french front doors and because my mother killed the pets that didn’t run; because i see my mother in myself, always. iv. because there were turtles she brought home from street vendors in the garment district in los angeles to ll our outdoor water feature and because the turtles were inevitably sucked into the pump and spat back out in shrapnel and carnage; because she went to the pound every week in search of the perfect miniature schnauzer, brought it home and named it “vegas,” let it run away when it pissed in the house or pissed her o , and then she’d rinse and repeat: vegas i and ii and iii and iv; because the bird froze in the garage and the cats strayed or starved; and because i killed the hamster, whose name i have forgotten, by crushing it under the swing of those glass french front doors on accident and because i watched it bleed out in pulses as its heart worked, slowed, then stopped. v. because i have sat up through every night of nursing and bleeding and pumping and colic and vomit and snot and tears and shit and because i want to guard all those raw workings of my own heart. vi. because, before my son was born, his father and i sat in his bedroom, both of us high, both of us wrapped up in french blue jersey sheets on the oor, both of us ugly ugly, ugly ugly—i wore another woman’s leather jacket like a beetle shell and he wore the last thing i ever saw him in. vii. because i see solitude where others see absence; because i see a mother like me and i wonder if giving her more burdens her any less. Leonard 34 viii. because two years before a short-lived boyfriend died of an overdose i held him and he held me and he touched my thighs in the tender way and he told me they were baby soft and every time my legs are touched now i feel his hand, gone, absent in the way i was for his funeral. ix. because i know my son feels his father’s absence like white space and because i am a motherpoet i am terri ed to ll it. x. because i have turned away gentle love when it came knocking, bearing a gold band. xi. because this love felt like a camp re and because i wanted reworks. xii. because i want to be the matador, cutting the tail trofeo after the ght. xiii. because i want to be in the stands, protesting. xiv. because i only want to settle down for a real squall, wind and water outside and us warm by the replace, inside and beautiful beautiful, beautiful beautiful while we wait for the weather to turn; because i want to settle down in a bed that feels like mine on saturday’s, and let my son sneak in to share it; because when i think about settling down i imagine launching o of that big hill, my little boy now big, bigger than i ever remember him. Leonard 35 Discussion I do not write about being an alcoholic. When I earlier wrote very plainly, “I am an alcoholic,” it was the rst time I’d done so. This is all very new to me, still, sobriety. To become sober, I had to rst realize that I was an alcoholic. It would have been easier if the realization had hit me like a cartoon anvil or a piano, really smashed me over the head and took me out cold. Instead, in liquor I boiled like a frog. I practice saying it, sometimes: “I’m an alcoholic.” I say it to myself in the mirror, and I nod and I understand. I haven’t had to deploy it yet to explain why I’m not partaking. I haven’t been out much. I quit in the fall of 2021, and by then I was accustomed to the inside of my apartment and too busy to leave it. And then, when the last time I drank started to fade from me, I became afraid to go out, too. I became afraid that I’d know what it felt like again, afraid I’d remember that day. This has felt like an incubation period, and it's this story I found myself writing about most; revisiting active alcoholism is as painful as it is unknowable. For a long time, I thought alcohol made me womanly. I’d seen my step sisters grow up, deconvert from Mormonism, and drink. I saw their friends, and my friends, too, beautiful and grown and having fun, and I wanted in. At rst, I dipped my toes into drinking, and then quickly drowned in it. Nineteen and fresh out of a failed LDS marriage, I dove into a partygirl persona, hard. I moonlit as a girl named Debbie; close enough to Libby, I thought, my ears would still prick if I heard it. I wanted to be someone else, to be divorced from my past self. Nine weeks after a New Years Eve party, my pregnancy test at Planned Parenthood came back positive. We talked, the father and I, and made some plans, but when I went to pick him up for my rst ultrasound appointment, his roommates let me know he’d skipped town and changed his number in the night, leaving only his mattress behind. This, Leonard 36 however, is not that story—it is not about the decisions I made then, the work I did, or the long break I took from drinking while my son was a baby. I don’t blame myself for that, then: I was young, and I was learning. The problem began when Debbie returned, when my son slept through the night and my new man served endless shots. I feel exhausted, writing this. I feel exhausted for Deb. Somehow partygirl had morphed; it was cool to be a “wine mom,” to be the sister who could keep up at all the family parties, to still be wild and wonderful every evening even though I was already doing so much else with my day. And later, when that relationship ended due to alcohol-fueled ghts on the knock-down-drag-out scale, my drinking got worse. It's hard to write about, and I found myself both pushing against it and pushing myself harder to do it. I found myself frequently musing on femininity, writing little character studies of formative women in my life, the ways they were or weren’t connected to my relationship to alcohol. When I was drinking, I had less and less contact with my family and friends, and especially with the women in my life. I felt like there was a call for reconnecting pieces of my story that alcohol had cut from me. At the heart of my story of alcoholism is also my story of sexual assault. This is also not that story, and maybe that isn’t a story I’ll ever be ready to tell, but its tendrils touch everything I write. This is another way that I became cut o from my conception of what it meant to be a woman. I also don’t think my story is an uncommon one—neither is my descent into alcoholism and my recovery journey. I don’t want to do research here, and nd out how many women are raped when drunk, how many women are blamed and disbelieved, how many are destroyed by it. I can’t bear to know, and I think that bears enough proof. Leonard 37 Case Studies alison for Nicole Walker right now, we are digging a hole to china in alison’s backyard, under the patio, where her parents either don’t look or don’t care. we know that our goal is unlikely to be reached. we are thirteen and built like the balloon men lined outside car dealerships and we have been to geography class, after all, and have gured out that we’d end up nearer to the mascarene islands than to china, but we go on digging, deeper and deeper under the deck. alison has big dreams, and bigger glasses, but she takes them o when we dig. alison says she likes the feel of the earth when she cannot see it. we talk about going to college, about having roommates and eating salads, we talk about our eventual celebrated arrival in beijing and our crushes—our trevors and lincolns and j.j.s. we make a series of premonitions together in the hole, which has now grown as deep as our two kid-shovels in a stack: we will get married on the same day, alison and i, and we’ll walk together down the aisle wearing fuchsia ball gowns and cathedral veils so long they wrap the chapel twice. i’ll win the pulitzer, alison promises, and she’ll win the olympics. she doesn’t mind where she gets her medals—ribboned rhythmic gymnastics or equestrian dressage or skeleton—it’s all the same to her. really, the only thing either of us are any good at is digging this hole, and we are disciplined. we meet at the rim every morning, shake hands the way we think real men do, and we get to work. we are convinced that this is the deepest hole in the universe, or at least in the suburbs. the sun burns us as we dig and our tanlines grow ever stranger. today, we are celebrating our summer birthdays in the hole, making cakes from layers of wet clay and scrying our future from the sediment. in autumn, alison’s yard will freeze. our shovels will lay dormant under the deck, then, later, become entombed in snow. in winter, the house will sell. in the end, we will not dig a hole to china, or even to the middle of the indian ocean. we will not celebrate our 25th birthdays together in two-drink minimum comedy clubs, we will not share shitty apartments and learn to plumb together, we will not skinny dip in the crick under the weeping willow with any trevor, lincoln, or j.j., and we will not talk everyday like we say we will; her life there, mine here. but right now, under slatted shade, in this blue-eyed summer, in these skinned knees, in this hole we dug by dreaming it, we do it all. we do everything. Leonard 38 whitney we wear pigtails pink bikinis at the lake in the morning our lifeguard teaches swim lessons and in the afternoon he french kisses whitney under the dock bodies they rock against the wood they hold a prayer meeting before lunch and we french braid each others wet hair way in the back. they call us twee -dledee and tweedledum they call us olive oil and popeye they call us to bear our testimonies and the boys make us too nervous to say anything at all. we’re into the fasting gig in our tents at night we confess we’d probably smoke cigarettes if it wasn’t against the word of wisdom and when the bishop visits camp to teach us about the millennium whitney and our lifeguard play footsie under picnic chair pews. bishop says pardon his french that after all of the gnarly crap in revelations goes down our people will bring peace on earth limited time only one thousand years of goodtimes. at the end of camp we wear sweatpants and wool socks the nights are getting cold whitney bears witness at the camp re smores on her lips she wishes the millennium would start now or maybe she’ll save herself until then because dating in the millennium she says has got to be the ultimate summer romance. Leonard 39 ruby grl we are getting mimsy tipsy tight wesmst be in gooooorgeous wemst be thrush ushed faces breeee athe hold up babe hold me ruby rude grl going gimble grly wild grly at the wabe wemst be forgetting we he we he we he we he we breeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee athe wemst be getting close clothes cuuuuuuu rious miss missy miss u ruby woo me in lip stick lips touch then u are sick in the sink wemst breeeeeeathee together heave together let it go grl get it out out out faucet on scoop and wipe scoop wipe hold scoop wipe holdsteady holdst holster hold back troops wemst scoop wemst wipe tomato and tripe and trout out out out and stout and stop. stand up straight grl goooooooooooood grl ruby release grl excavated grl exorcized grly u look great grl clean slate grl god for heaven’s sake grl hush ush grl keep quiet ur wrath wemst be in the territory of the snicker-snake and she bites babe she kills she will know the curious things we have wondered wrapped together on this oor. Leonard 40 debbie i wrote a poem about your apartment, deb, i felt trapped in it in your body debbie i was so glad to meet you cool girl, fucking stylish, thought i wanted to be you, deb, drunk, about your kitchen i wrote: she shares sugar on her knees she cooks by smell and by rum this was years ago debbie do you remember the night i wrote that poem? do you remember catching eyes with me, that i was on re that i used dull scissors to cut your hair, that i asked you, naked, in your mirror, why i gave you a name Leonard 41 ruby, too i once dated a guy who had even worse tattoos than he does —she gestures— his tattoos are innocent, the american flag —he shows us— the one with bleeding roses and lady justice, too —he exes— i dated a guy who had a pro life tattoo —she takes a shot— i fucked him like maybe three times —she swallows— and that was all it took —she closes her eyes— that motherfucker paid for my abortion —she closes her st— and i got this, instead: —she brandishes her arm— a snake choking humerus and skin ecdysis piled at her wrists reborn. Leonard 42 meredith meredith, merited, twenty-three, says she’s the head of surgery, in the dayroom, meredith is swallowed by her sweater, one mass of pink merino wool a writhing cocoon on the couch and somewhere in it is meredith, her ponytail peeking out, rocking her standard issue socks. in group therapy, we hear from a lawyer: i’m looking forward to getting back to work and i think he’s telling the truth; he looks like a lawyer to my teen eye, looks like he belongs here looks like he wears penny loafers and boy does he know about non-disclosure but i like hearing from him, he speaks softly, he chooses billy joel during music therapy and he is terrible at painting. somehow this makes him real, makes the whole thing real, this hospital, this mood oor, this construction crane out the window, presiding over us all. meredith just got here, graduated from some other oor, like i did, and they park her in the room next-door. in the afternoons, she watches downton abbey Leonard 43 looking out from one long pink neck hole and at night i hear her repeat the lines, accent and all. she’s very good at this, and very good at heart surgery, she assures us, and during music therapy, she sits next to the lawyer, copies his song request, and we all listen to “only the good die young” twice in a row. this is funny, or ironic, because most of us are here on account of suicidal tendencies, but this is really the lawyer’s jam, he loves this encore and on round two he sings the line about sinners loud, o -key, unrepentant and later that night, i hear it being sung again in the exact same way, one room over. i think about what it means, to gather us together like this, i think about the young man i met on the trauma oor, and his book of names he said belonged to the devil, which he made in art therapy Leonard 44 i think about the night i spent locked eyes with the crane, not sleeping and how i spent the next day reigning with tears and sleep deprived insanity at group talk therapy and then con dently kicked everyone’s ass in monopoly. there are a hundred ways through it, or at least three, yours, mine, or someone else’s; all there is to do is pick one, pink and warm, consuming. Leonard 45 Conclusion I’d like to think I can abide by the William Carlos Williams chestnut that “there is no idea but in things.” When I write about my mother, the thing comes easy—here, I have chosen her scissors. I have done so because they strike me as particularly salient: perhaps her catalog of small scissors stand in for her neuroticism. Maybe they say something about her consuming and precise ability to nd every aw, even in herself. Maybe the scissors mean absolutely nothing at all, and I remain haunted by the sight of angled silver spines and their droppings for nothing. Maybe that says more about me. When I have taught creative writing, I’ve told my students how important salient details are. “If you are writing about a man sitting alone and drinking, tell us what he’s drinking! Is it tequila in a shot glass, his third? Is it top-shelf champagne?” I tell them about the magic of choosing the most potent detail and exploding meaning outward from there. One of my incarcerated students, over the course of the semester, developed a series of whiskey-thieving heists committed by his character KrazyKlown after this lecture, describing in-depth the drink, or the lack thereof, in each piece. His work made everyone in the class laugh—and thirsty, too. I cannot answer these kinds of questions about my own drinking. I couldn’t write me in a bar, or in a liquor store, or at home, drink in hand. My character would drink indiscriminately—gin or wine or vodka or beer—it would all sound just ne by her. She wouldn’t have a neat Drink of Choice on which to dwell, to muse and mutate and dissect, to inform her character. Or, perhaps, that too de nes her character just as well. It’s hard to see these things clearly. I considered writing about the glasses I used, but those were too numerous, and very often shattered in the sink. I thought too about the trash bags and the toilets Leonard 46 and all the other vomit receptacles, but again, they were countless. It’s hard to see things clearly because I hate thinking about it. It’s hard to see things clearly because most often, when I drank, I drank until I couldn’t see or feel or think anything, at all. As I wrote, the resistance to tell, to categorize, and to name became a launching point for many of the poems and for the overarching organization. Mine isn’t a story that can be neatly told, nor easily so—I’ve often wondered why in the hell I’d set myself out to do this in the rst place. However, this is the way addiction and recovery is discussed: in stages, steps, processes and programs. Considering my story in this archival way, to study it and the characters within it through a variety of forms, allowed me to lean in to exploring the existing fragments in longer forms and remain restrained in others. Breaking the “ g” poems into methodologies—systems for getting drunk, for getting sober, for naming and for loss—proved to be a fruitful way of connecting these fragments. The archive of “no’s”—number, no— provided a similar outlet to speak directly to those most tender segments of story and give order to hesitation. Compiling the case studies of women throughout my life, and meditating in a non ction way on the woman most in uential to me, my mother, allowed me to explore the awkwardness and excitement of youth, the disorienting experience of being an alcoholic, the complicated and jagged experience of motherhood, and the piecing together of my identity. In a collection about addiction recovery, my mother’s scissors have remained my “thing;” they mean cutting ties, cutting out alcohol and stories, they mean violence and they mean care, regrowth. I’m thinking of picking up a pair next time I’m out—just in case. Leonard 47 Works Cited Aldridge, Alan. "A Good Guru's Guide to The Beatles' Sinister Songbook." Observer Magazine, 26 November 1967, pp. 26-33 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Dower, Kim. I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom. Red Hen Press, 2022. Gibson, April, et al. "Defying Tradition in Lyric Flash Creative Non ction." Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference, 9 Mar. 2023, Seattle, WA. Panel. Lerner, Ben. The Hatred of Poetry. Macmillan, 2016. Mayer, Bernadette. Midwinter Day. New Directions Publishing, 1999. Moore, Dinty W. The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers. Rose Metal Press, 2012. Orr, Gregory. “Writable Radiance: Notes on the Hybrid of Lyric and Prose.” Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Edited by Marcela Sulak and Jacqueline Kolosov, Rose Metal Press, 2015, pp 148-151. 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