Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, with Figurative Language
after Izzy Casey
Dr. So & So says that soon I’ll get better
at being better, & God knows
better couldn’t come any sooner,
considering the nightmares
of Uncle S. ripping
the multiple myeloma from his spine
& dropping it throbbing
& angry on my desk.
Considering the terrors in which I stroll
down the street, snap the fingers
from my hand, & pop them
between my lips, one by one, like grapes.
So & So, with his pen & pad,
wants to know how they taste.
Sweet, I almost say,
like when I was a boy
& nearly broke my teeth
against my beet-red walkie-talkie toy,
thinking I could manifest a strawberry
popsicle with my mind.
Maybe that was the beginning
of the transatlantic flights of fancy,
one half of me chasing the other half
up a snowy hill at midnight in a bet
to see if we could grow strong enough
to climb Mount Hood by February.
Not to mention the lower months, lounging
in a leather bean bag, gorging on Doritos & Fireball,
Lou Reed’s Berlin banging
its anvil across the room.
Pen in mouth, So & So counsels
that our time is up, & shows me
how to leave through the garage,
the only exit from his basement office, the door
pulled up on its tracks until it hangs flat
against the ceiling like a soul dragged from its body.
There was a time I believed I alone
could piggyback myself out of this crumbling house
but after lying so long breathless
under a rubble of my own making,
being better could be hidden anywhere.
The dash of rainbow in a puddle, for instance,
or the hidden sweet below the copper
I make out when I take small,
harmless nibbles of my fingers
to make sure they’re still real.
It can be like mapping out
the understory of an old-growth forest,
sifting through this mind I’m in.
Spectral in its color, ripe with the offspring
of vines & trees, a mind that’s mostly bananas,
bruised honeydew, bitter kiwi.
Matthew Tuckner (@tuckner_matthew) is a writer from New York. He is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at NYU where he was Poetry Editor of Washington Square Review and taught in the Undergraduate Writing Program. He is the recipient of a University Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the winner of the 2022 Yellowwood Poetry Prize, selected by Paige Lewis. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, Pleiades, West Branch, The Cincinnati Review, The Missouri Review, and Bennington Review, among others.