Poetry

By

Brianna Ricotta 

Love would be the flu…

when you’re like me juggling mental illnesses since nine birthdays old

You really wish you had a maraschino cherry chapped red nose

The sweats and chills all night as you slept

And all you had to do to heal was sleep and watch YouTube

while eating that store bought chicken noodle soup that came so easily

As for medicine take some Nyquil and Dayquil

Within a week you will be normal

The flu is so simple and friendly

compared to keeping your mind from sinking or floating away

while swallowing five different medications twice daily

to help you through the storms.

I look in a window surrounded by dangling snowflakes

Dark contours linger above me

Alarms sing through my mind echoing each other

PTSD triggered by the deep sunset blue on an Anthropologies fuzzy cashmere sweater.

Flashes of light mixed with memories of colors choreograph a dance in my head

for what seems like hours

a panic attack leaves me looking a rag doll

I grab into my periwinkle pink sparkling bag and pull out

interventions like a magician’s handkerchief act.

They’re not working.

I scramble for help just as the clock strikes thirteen.

Time to eat. Shit!

Now at a colorful restaurant

I feel frozen like the ice cube I twirl with my candy colored straw.

I stare at my favorite food in an eating disorder frozen panic.

My plate covered with moldy inner cow parts, harden sticks of lard, and fast dissolving sugars.

Thinking I can’t eat these poisonous pounds of calories so I have a stare down

and end up wishing I just had the flu.

Day 528 of Nonfiction

My story starts weaving through the wide gaps in my brain that leave a longing whistling noise of hurt and solitude

they sing a song “someday over the rainbow….”

My hazel tear filled eyes that flutter with charcoal black almost Rorschach inkblots like smudges fleeing down my face as I flash a perfectionist’s perfect smile.

Even though I repeat, and repeat perfectly imperfect, perfection clings to my rigid, bolted soul even on heavenly donut Sundays.

Through the sweet legally pink lips I speak the whole story and nothing but a story.

“I’m sorry God for using the bible this way but I cannot show my real self today.”

My body screams enough through my cockroach decaying black over stretched leggings and too small, senior citizen itchy wool cinereous sweater that I wiggled in, but I might as well be an elephant in a wormhole.

The vivid, imaginative like stories of my past that follows me as opaque puffs of H20.

where bomb threats seem like apple pie or like elephants meandering through my

neighborhood.

Brianna Ricotta 

Brianna Ricotta was told that she would never make it in life, that she was a hopeless case and should be put in a home. Now Brianna has her BA in psychology for the University of Colorado-Denver. She has interned at Children’s Hospital where Brianna worked as a research assistant on yoga therapy, her research will soon be published. She has also worked as an art therapy intern at Denver Health Hospital in the pediatric unit, PICU, and children’s emergency room. Her poem “Love Would be the Flu” was featured on a radio show in England. She also writes for the Huffington Post. Brianna also writes her own inspirational based blog here.