Sloshed

a poem of turbidity

Wide mouth Solo cup slinging round an s-curve, I woke up in a hotel room and more than once a hallway, the dregs of my brain dragging my body like a corpse. I lost keys like morals, like scruples, like scholarships and chances, always coming-to on the other side of the world — a circumstance claims its victim, but not me, I was busy co-creating my own abyss, a seasick dinghy riling up the waves. All I wanted was to feel good on the way to hell and make a new best friend in the unisex bathroom — and here I am, curled up fetal, trying to find a heartbeat in the dirt and begging the earth to take me back. Blackout promises don’t mean a damn thing.

After finding freedom from alcohol in 2018, I began writing poetry because there were stories inside of me that needed to get out — old stories, gritty stories, haunting stories, stories I had spent years drinking into the shadows, stories that needed to be forgiven, stories who, when they finally shimmied to the surface and blinked in the searing sunlight, released me from a heaviness of soul I had been carrying for decades. This was one of those stories.

Vixen Lea was the pen name for Skye Nicholson. Her first book of collected works, Unexpected Alchemy: Poems of Addiction and Awakening, is available here.