I do not know how to write pretty poems
about being an addict. I keep trying but the moon won’t show, and holy colors refuse their help. It is all puke and blah, sad mom sad me and blah, blah and drunk sex, blah and the details are stark and dark and failures — stuff my mother’s nightmares are made of. The details are let me make this busted Forever 21 dress into a lifestyle, are a garden tub and submerged sleep — the panic when waking and the disappointment at breath — are Cracker Barrel bathroom pukes, are bile on black leather, bile on porcelain, bile in a Solo cup, are this dick and that dick and who’s on first, who gave me chlamydia, who’s who when I am so tanked all the faces are highway blurs. Sometimes the details are contained — the Granville Co. drunk tank, my teeth in a coke mirror, hands down pants, apologies in a text. And sometimes the details are not— are regrets that weigh forever. The last night I ever drank it was with a man I hated, in an outfit begging for something softer than my own tined bones. I swallowed a rusty drink in a VIP loft. I swizzled my dumb tongue down his numb throat. I knew when I hit the brick, stumbling to my truck, cocksure I’d get home safe and on my own, that I wouldn’t. I am not smarter or more clever than a high. I don’t believe I am lovely, but I am tender and trying and at my worst I am drunk.
Adele Elise Williams (@AdeleEWilliams) is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at The University of Houston where she serves as Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast. She is a Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize finalist, winner of the Emily Morrison Poetry Prize, and a Hindman Settlement School Poetry Fellow. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Quarterly West, SAND, Crab Creek Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Her current goings-on can be found at adeleelisewilliams.com.