Margaret Sullivan is an American-Canadian poet and founding editor in chief of the Journal of Undiscovered Poets. She is a professor of consumer behaviour, with academic publications in the areas of vinyl music consumption and male body self- image. Her textbook chapter appears in On the Stigma Around Mental Illness, American Psychological Association Press. Margaret is the author of the poetry collection Mean Dogs, and her most recent poetry publications are in Yolk Literary Journal, Haiku Canada and The Galway Review. Her children’s book, Jacinta’s Orderly World, was published in Spring, 2024 by Plumleaf Press, Toronto.

 

The Tub Room at St. Ann’s Medical Centre

 

Here in the Tub Room

it’s a little bit of Heaven

and a lot of Hell

 

When they come around with the wheel chair well before breakfast 

and tell you It’s time

You Know

A man in a robe sits on the teak bench and says 

Get ready for pain like you can’t imagine, girl

And I say, Dude, I’ve gone through childbirth without an aspirin,

you can’t tell me about pain.

And he says, we’ll see

Sister Marie begins–

warmest towels in the world 

laid in the first ceramic tub

 

She has folded hand towels into pillows 

and rests them at the curve of your neck

She holds big pitchers of warm water at your forehead and pours 

Warm, warm, warm water flows down your back and fills the tub

The towels become your soft bed and you imagine you are on a fluffy beach

 

                                                Vicky and Matt grab you

                                                and drag your naked body 

                                                into the second steel tub

 

There are no towels and you have to sit upright

They stand behind you cracking inside jokes and giggling, at once loving this torture and wanting it to be over so they can go get fast food

They have long straight razors and they scrape my head from front to back,

rinsing the blades in the water I sit in, shards of my skin floating all around me, twenty minutes of this over and over again

 

Sister Marie puts on some music, twenty minutes’ worth and she tells me the order so I’ll know when we are at the last song. Sometimes it’s a side of an album, the Stones’ Let It Bleed or Blondie. Vicky and Matt quip about how this is their parents’ music. I imagine killing them with kitchen knives

 

                                                          They give you codeine

                                                          before they send you back. They

                                                          don’t tell you when’s next

 

Or why burns need to be scraped by nurse’s aides with razors most days

Or how long you have been here. Or if you’re ever going home again.

You find the man in the robe and say, You were right

 

We Wove Our Own Back Then

                                

Ann, in high school, Ayn

the most beautiful among us

isn’t in the year book                               

She had an appointment                          while we were       

at the abortion clinic                                                fluffing

Mr. Reed heard about it                                our bangs

and hid in his office                                 and posing

until she made the problem                                  and applying 

go away                                                         and re-applying 

It cost her the graduation check                     too much

from her Grandma Nancy                        blush

and hours                                                           mascara   lipliner

and hours                                                  patchouli oil

of babysitting                                            and making macrame backpacks

I Hope I Don’t Die

                                             

I hope I don’t die before I 

have a perfect bathroom

heated floors, a towel drawer

 

I hope I don’t die before I

get a Ph.D. in Taylor Swift

Take a sabbatical on the Moher Cliffs

 

I hope I don’t die before I 

Speak fluent Dutch

Play a movement in some orchestra

 

I’d say no to an oboe

but a flute would be fine

I’d take a tambourine any time

 

I hope I don’t die before I

get up on a stage 

and rap the Constitution 

 

I hope I don’t die before I

practice a religion

Have a past life vision

 

I hope I don’t die before I 

Shake hands with the Pope

or run out of hope

 

I hope I don’t die before I

Rescue a seal, help it heal

Release it back home 

 

Jailbreak

 

Relive that miracle that happened when my four year old son and I—I had just gone to get him out of pre-school or daycare or wherever I walked out of my job and ran there and was told they were on a field trip in the park so I ran to the park and there he was sitting outside the circle of children and ‘teachers’ and I grabbed him—he knew—he knew that we had had about enough so we quickly crossed the road onto Astor Street or Goethe and we walked up to—not to that big mansion—but we looked into the alley between the two mansions because there was definitely something there and we stood in the raw magic our legs trembling and we saw it. We saw the blue light that emanated from between those buildings and we stood there in it the two of us holding hands and brimming with life and hope and wisdom and dreams being made dreams being fulfilled we could have stood there forever we have been standing there in our memories our ongoing lives—lives that don’t begin to matter as much as life did that day I got up and ran out of my job and got him. My son.

 

Haiku

 

My cousin who is

a nun, said the Holy Spirit

moves through my poems