Green Linden Press

Notes on Depression

7:12 a.m.

The news is on. It’s Saturday, 
but there’s still news. The screen 
on mute, the car’s on fire, footage 
shaky: another bombing, or shooting, 
or missing person. You could be 
the person missing, almost. You won’t 
be able to watch after ten minutes. 
Too much. Outside, it’s bright, it’s morning, 
it’s terrible, but inside, it’s worse. 

7:47 a.m. 

You don’t sleep. Or, if you do, never 
well enough. You didn’t last night, 
up thinking of her again, her brown hair 
falling across her blue eyes, her leaving 
you because you know that’s what you 
deserve but you wake up 
and she’s still here, next to you. 

7:49 a.m. 

In the mirror, a man. He looks like 
you, or a version of you. Reach out 
your hand. Touch your face. Wipe 
the sauce off your cheek from 
the half-eaten burrito left out 
on the coffee table from last night. Clean 
yourself up. You look like a goddamn mess. 

12:04 p.m. 

If the medicine worked, it’d be 
working. Don’t forget to take it 
anyway. Did you take it yet today? 
You can never remember. Paxil. 
Lamictal. Klonopin. Lithium, the old 
staple. In your pocket everyday 
you carry a pillbox you’ll take into 
a bathroom stall on your lunch break 
during work days. Little fire 
extinguishers, you call them. You swallow 
them dry, walk out the same. 

3:14 p.m. 

Your parents call. This time, you 
pick up the phone. They tell you 
at least you’re not as bad 
as last summer, all those hospitals. 
Your father says you sound 
like a zombie. You laugh to be polite. 

6:32 p.m. 

Finally, you go outside. Today 
you’re at least getting out of 
the house. You’ve checked the mail 
four times already. Besides bills, 
you get letters only on your birthday. 
The aluminum of the box 
with your name card reminds you 
of one of those morgue refrigerators. 

6:36 p.m. 

You stand next to an oak tree 
with Spanish moss outside 
your apartment building. You used to love 
trees. You used to love a lot of things: 
sundials, apple slices, Christmas lights 
strung from porch railings, peanut butter. 
Put your cigarette out on the bark, go back 
inside. After all this time gone, 
she’ll wonder where you’ve been. 

Nesting

How the robin takes, places, weaves 
each piece of pine needle into the nest, 
forming the shape slow as snowfall. She pulls 

the silverware tray from the box I packed 
earlier, sets it on the table still crooked 
on the hardwood. How her arms in this new 

place, our first home. How I can’t help 
but watch the beauty of each muscle, each 
finger delicate as a branch. Each time the robin 

comes back to its nest, how deliberate, it knows 
the pine nest it makes against any other brush. 
Each return of the bird is obsessive, fixed 

in the path from field to tree and back again. 
I’m reorganizing the Ajax and floor polish 
below the sink. I push the chairs under 

the table, everything in its place. Her arms 
move the air like feathers. How strange 
to not want to leave, for once to not want 

to flee at the first sign of danger, like the robin 
before the hawk. As she takes another box 
from my hands, she weaves her arms into mine. 

William Fargason is the author of Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara (University of Iowa Press, 2020). His poetry has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Barrow Street, Narrative, and elsewhere. He earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland and a PhD in poetry from Florida State University. He is the poetry editor of Split Lip Magazine. He lives with himself in Tallahassee, Florida.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2020