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You are told when to sleep and when to wake up. If you spend too much time in your bedroom, it indicates that you’re being antisocial; if you do sit in the common areas, but don’t interact with the other patients, you’re probably depressed or overly inward or perhaps even catatonic. Humans might all be ciphers to one another, but people with mental illness are particularly opaque because of our broken brains; we cannot be trusted about anything, including our own experiences.

This is the address to the station that be playin the news, she say. Imma write to them and they gonna do a story on us.

I’m like, Yo, Kandese, that’s a good idea.

My mama put on the news every night. I didn’t know you could send them letters.

Ain’t no news cameras comin down here, Bernita say. Cops don’t even come here.

She love rainin on parades.

A grotesquely fat woman lives in the farthest corner of the village. Her name is Matilde. When she walks to market, she must gather up her fat just as another woman gathers up her skirts, daintily pinching it between her fingers and hooking it over her wrists. Matilde’s fat moves about her gracefully, sighing and rustling with her every gesture. She walks as if enveloped by a dense storm cloud, from which the real, sylph-like Matilde is waiting to emerge, blinding as a sunbeam.

At Bob’s Big Boy, one day in the summer, my mother and I pressed together in the phone booth and emptied her purse out on the metal ledge. There were hundreds of scraps of paper, pencils, leaking pens, scuffed makeup tubes, brushes woven with a fabric of lint and hair, a bra, and finally, my mother’s brown leather address book, with the pages falling out. We wanted to call my father in Las Vegas. It was already over a year since we’d flown there. The number was written, carefully, in brown ink.

The police ask me to empty my pockets. I turn them inside out and lay my miserabilia on the table. Two policemen quite unashamedly feel my thighs and ass, which tickles me. With clinical concentration they examine the stuff on the table. It is an obscene invasion of my privacy, more so than if they had turned my asshole inside out and inspected it under a microscope—any microbiologist could tell you that there we are remarkably similar. In pockets turned inside out you can see how we differ.

HOME IS WHERE

I peek from the slit
between my forearms.
Them. They come.
Eyes in all the heads glow. 
The flow
melts my arm flesh
Burgundy vessels drip
from bone.

The graveyard this time of year is nice. Damp orange yellow red leaves pile at the headstones for pillows. Place my head in leaves. Soil moist and black like chocolate cake and taste like worms. Arms spread legs spread wind crawls up my pants leg to pocket soft backs of knees. Slightly arched back anchors shoulders to my throat, jaw, head. Eyes fixed to the blue grey. Meanwhile. An old deer limps over, sits like a dog, licks my shoes.