I Am Just Fine

by Claire Scott

Andrei Slobtsov

The corporation planted poison ivy in my yard last night five plants, five feet apart along with twenty pink flamingos you know the tacky kind you see on cheap lawns not the nicer ones with solar lights I called the police but Laura (they are all named Laura) is tired of hearing from me and tells me to see a doctor or simply hangs up or doesn’t bother to answer when she sees my name

I have a doctor who thinks I am just fine although she has suggested a brief night or two in Lord Have Mercy Hospital along with something called DBS or TMS or ECT to help me leave the house, make some friends but my neighbors are nosey, peering in my windows at night, stealing my mail, wearing backward baseball caps my doctor gives me pink pills to take twice a day I toss them in the trash

As a kid I was left alone with my Ginny dolls dressing and undressing them in the shadow of curtains my mother kept closed even on sunny days while she stayed in bed behind a barricaded door she warned me to watch out for strangers, to cross the street or I might be dragged off in a car, beaten, beheaded and dumped by the roadside at night I could hear her crying as I lay awake listening to my father banging on the triple locked door

I notice dirt under my nails, five empty containers in the garage I notice a charge for $23.99 on my credit card I call the police

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Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.