lamictal love song

this is a love song to the CPTSD that has worked so
hard to rewire my muscles and organs and neurons
into the shell of a two hundred year old tortoise so i
may now be impenetrable. this is a love song
to the pulse punctuated staccato and stark
that pushes my veins deeper than they were meant
to be pushed. this is a love song to the creature that materialized
at the base of my grey matter that refused to allow my
body to succumb to surgical anesthesia, alone, in front
of a man in scrubs because an unattended body only becomes a body
once again filled with regret, guilt, salt.
this is a love song to empty pizza boxes.
this
is a love song
to the climactic cluster of cells that reside in my fingertips
that dance to white noise at noon and nine PM, coordinate choreography with
their cousins in my toes, twirling in their ballroom gowns so fast my skin
tingles and loses feeling. this is a love song to my fatigue: proof
of efforts exerted. this is a love song to the pair of scissors i salivate for.
this is a love song to my misplaced good intentions.
this is a love song to all of my failures, to the bird i stayed with as it died
that through its life perhaps had so many failures but death was not one of them,
to the failures that now mark my success, to my success
as it grows wings and leaves me, flies out the window.

alyssa hanna’s poems have appeared in Reed Magazine, The Mid-American Review, The Naugatuck River Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Pidgeonholes, and others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net, was a finalist in the 2017 James Wright Poetry Competition, a semi-finalist for the Hellebore scholarship, and a semi-finalist for the 2020 Nightboat Poetry Prize. alyssa is a Contributing Editor at Barren Magazine and works as a copywriter by day. She lives in New York with her fiancé and two lizards. follow her @alyssawaking on twitter, instagram, ko-fi, and tumblr.