Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Lane Falcon's poems can be found in American Poetry Journal, New York Quarterly, and Rust & Moth. Her poem "Escape from Cincinnati" describes a mother's awareness of the paradox contained in fentanyl, a drug that can ease her son's pain as he is suffering in the hospital, yet a drug that is killing and addicting the city's inhabitants.
"Escape from Cincinnati"
I still haven't gone back to that place -- the vacuousness
I felt while they dripped fentanyl into my son's bloodstream
after his second reconstruction surgery. How I'd go
on a panicked run every day in a city where opioids reigned
where a man fell to his knees, a woman froze under the overpass.
In the waiting room, a grandmother cried, her daughter
just dead from overdose, her grandson just waking
from general anesthesia. How messed up it felt
that night when I begged the nurse to hurry
and give my son more drugs, enough to sustain him, dull his pain
and mine, his pupils blooming with fear when he started to wake.
How small a measure they lent. How small the graces we get
when we're rowing in grief.
