2.14
9:33am
A spot! You’re 12 minutes earlier than your 15-minute-early
goal. You found a spot. You’re already making it work, today.
9:33:30am
The spot’s by a fast-food drive-in. It’s a real spot, but you see
why it’s open. A little too close to the driveway. Getting
sideswiped, a nightmare you can’t add. Smart people pass this
up. They don’t take the bad spots. They have the confidence to
stroll in a few minutes late. There’s enough time to find
another spot.
9:34am
Pace up and down and around the decision. Wince when cars
get too close. You should move. You should move the car for
peace of mind. It’s not too late. Move the car. You’re
supposed to be meditating on faith. You found this spot.
9:35am
It’s too late to move the car. You have an appointment. You
can’t make them wait.
9:38am
Leave car.
9:42am
Two-step turn. Check the bumper one more time. Clench your
stomach and turn towards the Drug and Alcohol Intake on
Fillmore. Walk. Cross. Take note of how much you don’t like
this street and can’t come back.
9:44am
Open the clinic door with your sleeve. This is the responsible
thing to do. Catch things before they spiral. You’re good at
this. Catching. Measuring. The damage already accumulated.
Both your therapists agree. It’s (probably) situational. But in
case.
9:45am
Fold into the instant stick of hot, candy breath and sanitizer.
Dirty, eggshell-tiled floors. Fidgeting hands and elevated,
tone-deaf greetings exchanged mid-conversation. Disquiet.
You were too honest. You’re always too honest, too late.
That’s why you’re here. No one checks the correct boxes on
health-intake forms. It should have gone, a routine physical.
9:55am
The first counselor wishes you a happy Valentine’s Day. You
have to recall the last 30 days, how many without a drink? It’s
been almost a year. Today, also Fat Tuesday. There are ways
to count, ounces in drinks. Binging denies a cruel imperial
chart. Were you abused? Always the oddest query. Do you
know what that means? Perspective makes it an impossible
question. Recalibration says, don’t be dramatic.
10:13am
You’re led with a plastic urine cup. Told to leave your purse
on the chair, the nurse will watch. The bathroom has no sink.
You can’t be trusted with water. No mirror. You can’t be. No
one here is allowed to see their fingerprint. It’s feigned
sanitization. It’s a false profile you surrender. It’s only that
piece of you.
10:19am
Drained. You step outside and ask where you can wash your
hands. There’s a sink in the hallway. You wash in front of the
half-sleeping man you saw earlier. He’s slinky hunched in a
chair, indifferent to your ceremony. His heart rate is seductive.
You mime his breaths. Every 11 seconds. You haven’t slept in
days. You’re asked if it’s ok to be weighed. You say, no. It’s
only blood you’re offering.
Kimberly Reyes |
levelheaded: 2.14
This poem is really concerned with time. It takes a cryptically formatted date (“2.14”) as its title, then goes on to mark out exactly 46 minutes of the speaker’s thoughts on what sounds like a particularly fraught morning. The poem’s timestamps—sometimes down to the second (“9:33:30am”)—let us experience the poem in real-time. It’s an interesting structural choice that pushes right up against some of our expectations of poetry, particularly because the fact that this happens over exactly 46 minutes removes a lot of ambiguity about what we are witnessing.
Time is a key component of any narrative, but it’s rarely such an important feature of lyric poems. This poem does tell a simple narrative: the speaker arrives at “the Drug and Alcohol Intake on / Fillmore” for a substance abuse test. But the poem seems more interested in conveying the galaxies of anxiety spiraling through the speaker’s mind at any given moment. What should be a simple victory, finding a parking spot, becomes an imagined scenario that devolves into self-loathing: “Getting / sideswiped, a nightmare you can’t add. Smart people pass this / up. They don’t take the bad spots.” And, per the poem’s timestamps, the speaker’s descent into an imaginary worst-case scenario happens in just 30 seconds.
Even beyond the poem’s structure, time is an essential part of the speaker’s perspective. The speaker’s initial celebration is caused by her arrival “12 minutes earlier than your 15-minute-early / goal.” Part of her pre-screening for the test involves recalling “the last 30 days, how many without a drink? It’s / been almost a year.” And as she leaves the facility, she notes a man’s slowed respiration (and her own abnormal sleeping patterns): “You mime his breaths. Every 11 seconds. You haven’t slept in / days.” As these moments rack up, we begin to understand the poem’s timeline-like structure is an extension of the speaker’s fixation on the passage of time, chiefly on the ways that it can signal health or disease. The structure has not been imposed on the poem. Instead time, rendered explicitly, is the only way this speaker can make us understand the toll of her frantic mind. The costs of the speaker’s anxieties, at least as far as this poem is concerned, may remain largely unseen. She gives urine or blood to the lab, but she also gives up something irreplaceable—time. And just like with bodily fluids, each time you relinquish a bit of time, you surrender a “piece of you.”
-The Editors