This Particular Heaven
Eating Disorder Recovery Center of Los Angeles
Okay so you show up
& sign in on a sheet of paper
then slump into the common area
where you are greeted by the eaters & the non-eaters
where you drop your floral print backpack & avalanche
onto a plush brown couch & remove from a tin
a wad of iridescent green putty
& twist it around your fingers & trap & pop pockets
of air & cover your friend Greta’s face with it
& wait for the tech to take your blood
pressure & here she comes, bounding out of the office—
twenty-something, absurdly
warm—incredible to think it will be she
who calls the treatment team
to snitch on Greta
for drinking in the apartments with one of the others
& Greta, the Charlottesville marvel, the secret cartwheeler,
will choose the history-churning work
of sobriety & will remain here
while her friend is asked to leave
for cussing out & threatening the therapists
& Greta will tell you––later, as you drive her
to her first sober living house—that her friend
called the girl taking your blood pressure a name
I will not now repeat—
why sully this particular heaven, heaven of struggle—
in which Greta, luminous, now
pretends to be a witch, face encased in loops of emerald, making
guttural sounds as if a swamp were writhing
in her throat, & you are laughing
& the tech is scolding you because
laughter messes with the blood pressure
reading but she is sort of laughing herself, as are
the others, sprawled out on the couches & (cell phones
having been collected in a small wicker basket) journaling
& fidget-spinnering & braiding
one another’s hair, & the one stealthily emptying your backpack,
turning it inside-out & zipping it up,
& the one who will inform you of the color of your aura
but say it’s not her business to tell you
what it means, these young women
you’ve come so easily to love, to feel like the big brother or uncle of, or
if this were a cartoon, the animal
attendant of the princess journeying through the woods—
though surely they would roll their eyes
& whack your arms to hear you say that, invested as they are
in your own recovery, & if you brought it up
in group, Greta would interrupt & say
whoa whoa whoa whose voice is this
& you would stop & chuckle & not know & not
know & know only how grateful you are for her,
for those who have come to this
odd rookery to learn to love themselves
a little like they love one another—without prudence
or politeness, a wily, mountain-crossing love,
the love of the characters in some book
at the end of which there is a book
that will be opened
& something set free will be trapped
or something trapped will be set free
& the book, obviously, is the body
or the mind or the, whatever this means, the heart.
Which you have been told to open, open,
& did not know what that meant either, until now, until
you’re sitting among this resilient parliament, waiting
for the therapist in her Converse
& cardigan & torn Fleetwood Mac t-shirt
to round the corner & announce
the first group of the day, until
you’ve goofed & sung with the other weirdos
laughing their butts off, faces
bright as a sistering of angels, that what it means is
just to have a heart
& make sure it is near some other hearts
& wait. & o
when it has been months
since you’ve “graduated” into the outside world,
how you will miss this, how you will miss this place, how strange
to miss the evidence of your failure.
Your failure in every hug, in every wild guffaw, your every failed
love leading you back toward itself,
another chance to bungle it,
another chance to push the plate away—or pull it toward you—
another chance to crave
another chance.
Jeremy Radin is a poet, actor, and teacher. His poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Gulf Coast, The Journal, Passages North, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Shallow Ends, and elsewhere. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Slow Dance with Sasquatch (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012) and Dear Sal (not a cult press, 2017). He lives in Los Angeles with his four plants and his refrigerator. Follow him @germyradin.