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Photo by Taylor Leopold on Unsplash

Poetry | November /December 2020

Take it Back

By Amanda Jaros

It’s like theres an invasive weed that just spreads out of control.

John Green, Author of The Fault in Our Stars, on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).
I don't accept this cup of pain,
legacy I have regifted 
against my will: a constant 
parade of dark thoughts
like supplicants begging for relief.
 
I never realized how heavy 
the yoke of reassurance, 
how stifling the confessor's cassock, 
the call to expiate 
a hiccuping uncertainty—
what if, what if, what if.

I never realized how hard 
it was to love
me when I was like this.
 
She comes to me now,
my little daughter
with full moon eyes, sweaty
palms, and a stomach full of bees.
She carries the dark seed
sown in her tiny wrinkled brain
before she was born.

Take it back, this vestige
of evolutionary advantage,
this hypervigilance
impossible to appease,
this malady 
I wish I didn't 
recognize.

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