prozac and benadryl
A Poem by Marisol Cortez
they drive us to suicide
then tell us we did it
to ourselves,
we're just like that, crazy,
always have been, everyone
said so, lookâoverdosed
on the very same pills
they insisted
we didn't need
to begin with
we shouldn't have
we wouldn't have
if only
we were different,
tried harder,
worked harder,
changed our thinking,
prayed harder, meditated
watched the right YouTube videos or
got off the socials altogether and
touched grass, exercised, accepted
ourselves
more
if only we hadn't been
crazy to begin with
maybe
we'd still be alive, how tragic!
just goes to show
they were right, we
were the real problem
all along
like they said
as they threw us
to the ground and beat us
to the point
a teacher down the hall
heard the hard sound of skull
smashed into tile
like the kids
in elementary
who would grab
your hand, hit you
with it
hard, saying:
stop hitting
yourself, why're you
hitting yourself, what's
wrong with you,
huh? huh??
Marisol Cortez writes across genre about place and power for all the borderwalking weirdos out there. She is the author of the award-winning South Texas cli-fi novel Luz at Midnight (FlowerSong Press 2020) and I Call on the Earth, a chapbook of documentary poetry about the displacement of Mission Trails Mobile Home Community (Double Drop Press 2019).
