Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2021 a structuralist, he’d find where my life had lost balance & say, There it is!; a post-structuralist, he’d deny my repression & wholly claim it as his own; a modernist, he’d beg me not to tell him; I’d remain motionless. In the parking lot post-appointment, theories’ tentacles through my eyes are electricity cusping my brain. The $10 copay is the same price as a copy of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality with three months of Lexapro. I squint until the words become static. The trees rust at their edges, too. Mid-September: like serpent, like ember. The antidepressants mute my mind, erase my answer. What are you not telling me? [
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Cole Depuy, winner of the Negative Capability Press Spring 2020 Poetry Contest, is a Ph.D. student at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York & a recipient of the Provost’s Doctoral Summer Fellowship. His poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in The Summerset Review, Offing, Paterson Literary Review, Penn Review, Ilanot Review, & elsewhere. He is CoPoetry Editor for Harpur Palate & instructor for the Binghamton Poetry Project.
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