Side EffectsText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedLithium—my saviour,mummified me in cotton batting,weightless.I leave softer footprints.The bloodhounds quiet, curl up at my feet.I feel blackness peel off the walls, and I am grateful. I stop fantasizingrunning into traffic,a swaying brown knot. My fingers begin to quakelifting a glass — a betrayal of tremors —a growing self-consciousness.A fear of being exposed, I wait until I have the all-clearto surreptitiously sip.But lithium salt made me water-thirsty,a notoriously unquenchable thirst.I learn a game of misdirection:Look please, look at anything,except the polar bear womanencased in icewith trembling hands.Soft Second SkinText within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
O starry starry night! This is how I want to die:/into that rushing beast of night.~Anne Sexton1.Did you think about your friend, Sylvia?The two glasses of milk she left out.Did you think about Virginia? her stone-weighted, water-logged coat.You took off your jewellery —removing identity.Slipped on your mother’s fur pelt —that soft second skin.You poured a vodka elixir,locked yourself in the garage.Nothing tentative about carbon monoxide;night without end,driving headlong into darknesswithout morning. Who found your wide-eyedbody at the wheel?What an unsurprising legacy for a self-doomed poet,the seductive end you wrote about,solution to fathomless grief.2.I wait for cold wind to stop. I wait for dawn; I know it’s coming.Sometimes I indulge in fantasy: fraying rope, pills —God knows I have enough.But I can’t romanticize my own ending.I’ve known others who orchestrated a finale —a sharp intake of breath —a sullen quiet afterwards.3.There was nothing singular about your exit,your life turned into an old story,left people who loved youto figure out their forfeiture,your readers to decode your departure.
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“Side Effects” and “Soft Second Skin” © 2024 by Myna Wallin from
The Suicide Tourist (Ekstasis Editions, 2024). Published with permission of the author.Myna Wallin got her MA in English from the University of Toronto and is the author of A Thousand Profane Pieces and Confessions of a Reluctant Cougar (Tightrope Books, 2006 and 2010 respectively), as well as Anatomy of An Injury (Inanna Publications, 2018). She has a beautiful senior cat named Star, and at last count twenty-seven thriving houseplants.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
The Suicide Tourist
by Myna WallinEkstasis Editions, 2024
Publisher’s Description
A significant challenge of bipolar illness is the difficulty in making coherent decisions; one becomes an unreliable narrator in one’s own life. In this mental health confessional, poems about depression, mania, suicidal ideation, and the challenge of living with these disabilities are tackled with naked honesty and deep humour. In The Suicide Tourist, Wallin supersedes the stigma surrounding mental illness and excavates the themes of anxiety, fear, instability, mortality, and ultimately, liberation.
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