That Summer at Seaside

we slept in the attic      in two twin beds
and I was off my meds     by choice
this time     I thought it would be a good idea
it had been     months without a panic attack

I was     doing well enough     I was
wrong     the roof of that beach house
leaked in the night     waking me    to the sound
of rain inside the room     you stayed
asleep     I laid out towels to catch
the storm     pooling on the buckled hardwood
it must’ve leaked before     the maple boards
turned grey as ash     I could see
even in the night     I could not fall back asleep

I needed to be next to you     in the morning
your family downstairs     didn’t understand
why I was acting strange     I thought I was
doing well enough     still ashamed
to tell them     I was medicated
or not     that those were withdrawal effects
or worse     simply how I felt     unbalanced

the sand rose     like a storm surge
I could see     from the window overlooking
the street     laid with bricks     small channels
full of rain drying in the sun     I could not go
with your family to the beach     their cooler
full of cans of shandy     inside I stayed
for hours     the hum of my body
down from the medicine     sobering up
my brain chemistry     I thought
I would see more clearly     without

you     came inside     asked me to join you
I headed upstairs to get my things
the damp towels     crumpled across
the floor     a field of sleeping newborns

Photo Credit: Colby Blackwill — Photo Credit:
Colby Blackwill

William Fargason is the author of Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara (University of Iowa Press, 2020), and the winner of the 2019 Iowa Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Barrow Street, Indiana Review, The Cincinnati Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in Brevity and The Offing. He received two awards from the Academy of American Poets, a scholarship to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a 2018-2019 Kingsbury Fellowship. He earned a BA in English from Auburn University, an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in poetry from Florida State University, where he taught creative writing. He is the poetry editor of Split Lip Magazine. He lives with himself in Tallahassee, Florida.