SOS : Surviving Suicide Anthology Highlight : CARLOTTA ALLUM's "We Watched Her"

 

CARLOTTA ALLUM

We Watched Her

 

Hannah was always striking, angelic long hair,

Hannah stayed with us a lot, roaming the house

dressed only in an oversized Stone-Roses tee shirt

              We watched her

 

Hannah could write beautifully, cursive, neat beyond her years

Hannah liked to dance, as a child on the stage in the West End,

the Royal Ballet School took note

              We watched her

 

Hannah was super smart, reading Natural Sciences at Cambridge

Hannah was sent home in her first term

after setting fire to herself in front of her tutors on stage

              We watched her

 

Hannah spent hours in the shower and washing her hands

Hannah was weighing everything she ate

She was painfully thin

              We watched her

 

 

Hannah was working as a dominatrix

Hannah had lined the walls of her room with tin foil

as people were listening

              We watched her

 

My psychiatrist asked me

if there was any mental illness in the family

I think of Hannah, her light burning bright

When Hannah was well, she embraced life, she danced

              I admired her, watched her

 

Hannah was on a suicide ward outsmarting the nurses

Hannah kept back medication and smuggled in a plastic bag

Her mum knew,  “She’s going to do it”

             

“PLEASE, WATCH HER”

             

              They didn’t watch her

 

                                                                                                                  

From the Press:

As a result of her death, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust made changes to their patient observation policy. It would only have taken around eight minutes for Miss Allum to take her own life.            

“For us, reliving our worst fears that Hannah might take her life and our endless efforts to make those caring for her recognise those concerns, has been, at times, impossible to bear. We will al-ways feel that Hannah was failed by the trust. We understand that certain things are now different as a direct result of Hannah’s death, but this is too little too late for our dear Hannah or for us. We want Hannah to be remembered for her beauty, intelligence and wit.”

.

Carlotta Allum is  Director at Stretch Charity that continues to support vulnerable groups to access the arts and education, centered mostly on storytelling and the power to transform through positive and creative life stories.

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Title Poem from Mike Graves' new book, "Preparing the Apology"

Preparing the Apology

Mike Graves

She looked like you.

Slim, in a short shift.

Her breasts were like two heaving moons.

Her cheekbones Slavic,

And her wide eyes warm

Her manner natural.

Her lips full, without lipstick.

Her legs bare

To the middle of her thighs,

Promised ecstatic pleasure.

She looked like you.

Her hair was tied in a simple knot,

Decked with a white blossom.

Her poems were terrible.

I didn’t care...

We lay entangled in her boyfriend’s bed,

Juices leaking out of us.

She looked like you...

Michael Graves is the author of four chapbooks, two of which are digital, and three full-length collections. The chapbooks are Outside St. Jude’s (R. E. M.,1990), Blatnoy (madhattersreview3.com, 2005), Illegal Border Crosser (Cervena Barva, 2008), and Fifteen Villanelles (Robert Perron.com 2020). The full-length books are Adam and Cain and In Fragility (Black Buzzard, 2006, 2011) and A Prayer for the Less Violent Offenders: Selected Short Poems of Mike Graves (Nirala, 2017). He has published fifteen poems in The James Joyce Quarterly and has read from his “Joycean Poems” to a gathering of the James Joyce Society at the Gotham Book Mark, April 12, 2002. His poem “Apollo to Daphne” appears in Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths (Oxford, 2001) The Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation awarded him a grant in 2006. He organized the conference, Baptism by Fire: The Work of James Wright at Poets House, NY (March 27, 2004). And he has been coordinating and hosting the Phoenix Reading Series for about twenty years.

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FROM SOS : Surviving Suicide : British Poet Christopher Southgate's "Sestina"

 

CHRISTOPHER SOUTHGATE

Sestina

for Karen and Ros and Sue, Richard and Peter and Simon,

and many others

                     

I came here when I was nineteen, to get well

from a kind of flash-flood of down, from a tyrant rule

of spiders over the thin moon of me. Safe from harm

here, they said. The film’ll run slowly. Under control.

No-one will have to know. No-one will notice.

They didn’t say I’d come out with a label.

 

Mind you, it was a kind of comfort, the label,

at first. People could see I’d fallen down a well

that was real. It made them take notice.

Then we lost our insurance. It’s a rule,

the girl on the phone said. So I lost control

and broke the phone. My friend left. Only then the self-harm

 

and the Seclusion Room. What’s the harm,

I said, if I cut myself? Is that the wrong label?

They tried things out till I was under control:

Thirty milligrams the spiders. Seventy milligrams, well,

Numbness, like living yesterday over. Fifty mgs rule

O.K. Not disruptive enough to notice.

 

I watch the trees a lot. I stand by the notice

That says all visitors must sign in and out. Harm-

less words. I tell another patient it’s a good rule.

He tells me I’m a police spy. I like that label.

Whoever made my loneliness made it well.

But who was it? And is he still in control?

Sometimes I stand and think - this is a sick plan to control

a special person who’s been fighting stuff a long time. ‘Notice

the difference, when you treat me right!’ I shout. Does no harm.

It is better here, than years ago. Same label -

but they ask about the colour of the bricks in your well.

Sometimes they help you choose to go ahead and keep a rule.

 

Maybe it has to be that certain drugs rule

your life, that without them there’s just no control

over the downs. But staff do talk to you, go past the label,

if you get the right one, with some time to notice

you. To see you’re choosing between living and no more harm

ever again. I read once that all shall be well -

 

tell me then: if I knew every rule, and could get people to notice

me, and was under control with the drugs, and was no harm

to anyone, and lost my label, would I be called well?

 

 

 

Commissioned by the local NHS Trust to express the concerns of long-term sufferers of mental illness, and read in the Service held in Exeter Cathedral to mark 50 years of the NHS in Devon.

 

Christopher Southgate trained originally as a biochemist, and has since been a house-husband, a bookseller, a lay chaplain in university and mental health settings, and a teacher of theology. He has published four collections on poetry with Shoestring Press, the most recent being Chasing the Raven (2016). In 1997 he wrote an exploration of the life of T.S. Eliot through an extended biographical poem with companion essays, published as A Love and its Sounding (Salzburg). In 2017 Canterbury Press brought out an edition of Southgate’s spiritual poems entitled, Rain falling by the River. His theological work includes The Groaning of Creation, which has proved to be a seminal study of the problem of suffering in evolution. Chris lives on the edge of Dartmoor, Devon, and he continues to be deeply influenced by this landscape, as well as by the journey of his Christian faith.

 SOS: Surviving Suicide: A Collection of Poems that may Save a Life  

Edited by Dean Stalham

ISBN: 978-81-951915-1-2 Pages 159 Demy

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