The Truth About Tigers

The Awakenings Review is a literary journal published by The Awakenings Project, an organization founded to support the artistic work of people with a lived experience of mental illness. Established in 2000 with support from the University of Chicago Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation, the journal publishes poetry, fiction, and art by writers and poets who have a personal relationship to mental illness, whether their own, a family member’s, or a friend’s. It is one of the few literary journals in the country exclusively committed to this community, and received Mental Health America’s 2024 Media Award.

Five of my poems appear in the Spring 2026 issue, Volume 13, Number 1. The journal is print only, but I’m sharing them here. If this kind of work matters to you, it’s worth supporting. You can find them at awakeningsproject.org

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Quiet Compliance

The mask becomes your face—
a shell you never meant to keep,
carved to coax a voice
out of the natural quiet
that was always yours.

In small, obedient gestures
you built your own confinement,
grasping for the thing that kills,
just to vanish a while longer.

There’s a kind of magic in it—
to disappear in plain sight,
to fold yourself beneath
the weight of expectation—

while the machine cranks out
billion-dollar death campaigns
disguised as joy,
as rebellion,
as belonging.

To adapt to illness,
to bury the self in the haze,
all for the familiar delusion—

Look at us!
Soul-split specters, clinging—
pleading for the dose.

Normal is a fragile,
strangest fiction.

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Measuring the Distance

Each morning, a slight revision,
colored by thoughts
                and opinions—
both mine
                and the ones I’ve borrowed.

The mirror doesn’t argue.
It only offers
                    today’s version of me.

Somewhere, in the silver hush
                                of reflection,
a stranger lifts my hands,
measures the distance—
                     who I am,
                     who I almost was.

Choices aren’t made—only followed.
  A series of events, disguised as free will—
    the past bends into the shape of my body,
      a path unfolding just as I arrive.

                      Perhaps I’ve always been
walking backward,
mistaking repetition
for progress.

A shift in light.
A warping of glass.

No one
              ever
                        steps fully
                                into focus.

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what follows will follow

run long
and sit often.
what follows will follow.
what stays behind
was not worth holding.

the demons lose interest
when there’s nothing left to feed on,
when sweat carries away
what words cannot.

the mind,
emptied by effort,
listens.

there is no trick to this.
no door you forgot to open.
no shortcut.

only breath, body
mind, discipline.

and the sound of your feet
on the path,

the slow untying
of everything
you thought
was you.

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I Loved Hemingway the Most

There was a time,
a million years ago,
when I believed art
held some unique truth—
a breath beneath color.

I angled paintbrushes toward the sky
like telescopes,
searched headlines through a camera lens,
stood invisible on street corners
with a ghost-hungry journal.

I tore myself open—
self-inflicted reflections
spilled onto canvas,
staining darkroom floors,
always looking.

But then winter arrived
and I called off the search—abrupt.
Like the last shot fired
in a clean, well-lighted place.

What truths can you find
in five short years
of stick-figure drawings
and sloppy finger paint?

After I dropped the last shovel,
I briefly dug for meaning
beneath desert dogma,
but the ground split too wide
for a mind broken
but still skeptical—
too stubborn for feel-good bullshit
or vague deity threats.

Once, I took a poetry class
with a teacher who meant well.
She was kind. Talented.
But when she said,
To be a good writer,
you sit at the computer and bleed,
my eyes rolled so far back
I saw the past.

Me—alone in a room of books,
loving Hemingway the most.

If you’re going to modernize a stolen quote,
at least credit the dead man
who suffered it first.

Not that I’m above theft.
For a decade,
I wore a borrowed smile,
stretched over my face like cheap fabric,
just to dodge that empty concern,
Are you okay?—
a dumb question with an easy answer
I learned the old-fashioned way.

Eventually, the smile became my own.
And maybe there was truth to be found
somewhere—
but I’m not going to tell you about that.

Because even if clichés
sometimes crack open the dark,
you wouldn’t want to see them here.

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If I Let Myself Go

If I let myself go—
not just falter, but fall—
I lose the trail back
from the sorrow of strangers,
absorb the newsprint weight of grief
until it settles in my marrow
like winter.

The lines drawn in blood
blur easily—
becoming this mother,
and the father
across the river.

To feel what the world keeps
behind glass
is to glimpse something unspoken,
something real.

Not evil, exactly.
Maybe wrongness.
A hollow in the hive-mind
where reason should live—
the inheritance of lazy thinking
and sun-faded flags.

This old game?
Yes, we’re still playing,
though no one remembers
to keep the score.

And I can choose to carry the cost,
or set it down—
to look away,
like we do with so much else.

For now,
I’ll stay a while—keep vigil
in that hollow room built for one,
but known by all,
eventually.

I suppose I owe
at least a breath of attention,
the small price of saltwater and silence—
to follow the trail,
step into the slow-dark hush
of grief that isn’t mine—

and let it be.

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