Touch: The Journal of Healing

 
























































































 

No Storm Like Him

    by Katherine DiBella Seluja


One thin crack

in the plastic sign


on the locked ward door

winds its way through


Authorized Personnel Only

like a branch


of the Hackensack River

where we used to play


dried mud thick

on our shoes split


in so many places

our mother's face


when she said  We just readmitted your brother.

He told us his crystals were melting.


Waiting for the orderly

to turn his key


I turn back


to our winter childhood

under the cellar stairs


wooden clipboard

blue graph paper


we were base camp

guardians of snow


charted drift

and temperature


graphed hope

for Sunday night storms.


The day I found him frozen

in the kitchen


cold words stuck to his tongue


psychosis


     schizoid


          mania


what was this illness of ice?



Grey clouds

and thorazine doses increase


he wanders the blizzard alone

no guide rope tied to the door


unique as each stellar dendrite

no two of him alike.





© 2013  Katherine DiBella Seluja





Katherine DiBella Seluja received degrees from Yale and Columbia University.  Her poems have appeared in New Mexico Poetry Review, Santa Fe Literature Review and Sin Fronteras.  Her chapbook, After the Thread Unravels, was a finalist in the 2012 Bordighera Poetry Competition.   She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and dreams in Siena.

Copyright © 2013

Touch: The Journal of Healing

All rights reserved.