on the labels of pill bottles – my medicine cabinet after I’m finally gone
Alex Sobel
Amoxicillin
a pain things strangled not by choice or violence but inability to note what wafts inside my own eyes what two-steps in a light that refuses to flicker
Excedrin Migraine
headaches that roost so I make them a part of me of how I am an alibi (how opportune) a feature to be earned to be sympathized with and eventually:
Cetirizine
to be missed when I’m gone
Dramamine
in letters too small to read the lives I’ve lived too many I’d say that I press and write about and relive only to come up not pitted but still left without like a poorly excavated grapefruit
Ibuprofen
acne scars a loneliness unpunished just teenage years culpability like pulp dripping down chins
Melatonin
the love a significant other kept from view the bitterness the repetition that become a singular pain an inability to converge on rain tumbling across windows or the world sauntering the sound of a direction followed and kept to
Tums
envy (which I eventually mercifully died with) and
Tylenol PM
ulcers that are me that are in me that my doctor said are because of coffee and stress and how I should lacerate numberless desires and I think
Prilosec
about my brain and my gut and connections still apart like ghosts like what I am like in movies everyone reaching for those they love for those they can’t reach for those they can’t
Tramadol
the bottles’ contents which what was the plan to be swallowed or snorted or thrown in the toilet or stashed in a drawer somewhere where the label will erode and the name and dosage left unknown only someday when I’m looking for an escape I’ll find it and hoping for the best relax them onto my tongue
Oxycodone
and then in a dream when I refuse to swallow I’ll call it grace call it sweetness because
Wellbutrin
there will be something to show something worth remembering
Clozapine
something worth taking
Alex Sobel lives in Toledo, Ohio where he is a therapist for children with autism. His writing has appeared in publications such as Electric Literature, The Saturday Evening Post Online, Dark Matter Magazine, and Daily Science Fiction.