**Backpack Part II

It’s not that I shoulder a navy
pack on my disintegrating back.
It’s not that I actually swallowed
the kind of pills that retch
even the rage out until 
I could not keep anything down, 
and so I turn instead to my veins 
in one extinguishing, bloody hope. 
It’s because I know what 
it feels like to not have home,
to carry someone else inside 
but have nowhere for either of us
to sleep, and every creak of someone 
else’s bed creates more distance 
in my ribs until you can fit a fist 
between the bones and rip out even 
the last drip of dignity that used 
to work well for me. And I do know 
what it means to have to rely
on white powder, liquid or tablet just 
to keep alive, how easily the scales
of addiction can tip, how simple to say, 
this is it, pour it all out on the table 
alongside a filthy cup brimming with 
rusty water. So when I turn away, 
when I sentence my eyes to the earth 
and cannot look you in the face, it is 
not because I don’t love you in my own 
agape way. It is because seeing you 
reminds me how desperately close we all are, 
how each mutter we make in the boardroom 
or on a templated page can literally mean 
the difference between someone turning 
CEO and someone silenting through 
aging pavement, seeping into subways 
and ground soil, turning reservoirs a deeper 
shade of brown, reminding each of us 
we could have been the one to stop it. 

Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt, copyright March 22, 2024, all rights reserved 
**I named this Part II because I have a similar poem in my book Poems from the Battlefield.