02-10-2024
Eugenia Leigh
UNDIAGNOSED
When my father kidnapped us,
I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to be
feral. I wanted to test my luck.
Plane rides fall short of that first plane ride,
bookended by police. Men fail
to meet his standard of surprise. Three a.m. wakings
on school nights. Sometimes to whip us
for imagined sins, sometimes
to dance. I need to see the music
quaking in the furniture. Chair legs jittering, cheap wood
threatening to split. I took my first steps outside this country
with a herd of church kids
on my nineteenth birthday. I convinced them to drive
to Tijuana. That’s how I found the one
I bribed to drag the virgin out of me.
Before I tried to kill him, I saw ten nameless angels
bungling about his dorm. Then
the torment set in. I wouldn’t leave my top bunk for weeks.
We never saw my father sleep
when it was time to sleep. He wound around the house at night,
a broken or horrifying toy that wouldn’t shut off.
Or he slept for weeks.
I was the one who would risk
rousing him to check. Thirty years
I lived with the urge to run into traffic. And did.
Windows thrown open, floor-standing
rosewood speakers flooding our home with rock operas,
we couldn’t hear our voices.
That’s when we knew he was happy.
That’s when we knew we could breathe.
BIPOLAR II DISORDER: SECOND EVALUATION (ZUIHITSU FOR BIANCA)
We all called her Bianca. My fever, my havoc, my tilt. Bianca trashed the kitchen. Bianca scratched the shit out of me. Bianca owes me a mattress, owes me money, owes me cigs. It was funny sometimes. It was a joke.
/
Bianca would spin the car up and down the highway. Night after night, she’d steer while picturing her rickety red Kia, her silver Hyundai sliding down a track of ticker tape, unfurling, unfurling.
/
Psychiatrist: You would drink upwards of ten alcoholic drinks a day, every single day, then the minute you decided to stop, you’d just stop? That’s not alcoholism.
/
My brain, a wheel. The rim: Bianca up, itching to shred the asphalt. The center: Bianca down, fetal-curled. For years, I crawled—up, down—its spokes. One spoke was a river, but I couldn’t swim. Another spoke, a live wire. Yet another was a man I climbed like a tree. If I am stretching the metaphor, he, too, I felled.
/
Bianca, age 24: Not a metaphor: I walked in on an angel smoking a pipe in the tub.
/
Bianca, 20: I keep conjuring my friend’s mother, who’s been dead since he was a child. I see her sitting on the planter outside Sproul Hall each night I leave the boy in his bed to slink back to mine.
/
I comb through my chaotic stockpile of journals and notes—ebullient [strikethrough] convictions [strikethrough] delusions about the Universe, its Magic. Glittery pronouncements about every [strikethrough] Godincidence [strikethrough] coincidence on numerous short-lived blogs taken down and archived for doctoral students who will surely study me.
/
Bianca, 26: What I said: “I just got my period. That explains the last 72 hours.” His reply: “The stock market crashed. Colossal. Today.” And can you believe it took me more than a minute to assure myself the two weren’t related?
/
Months after the miscarriage, sertraline. The psychiatrist warned that for some people, antidepressants can, like the bullfighter’s muleta, incite mania. Let’s do it, I said. If [strikethrough] the bipolarity[strikethrough] Bianca is there, let her show her horns.
/
Bianca, 33, scales a pole made of silk. She tears through the city in a wig, ice blue. She sneaks shots of well whiskey on her way to the bathroom. She mistakes my husband for a pointillist painting, which alarms her. She mistakes my husband for a collage of every man who has [strikethrough] threatened to call [strikethrough] called the police because you’re acting fucking crazy, which makes her scream. She screams at my husband who, like the others, is saying, Please. We are only two blocks from home.
/
The diagnostic experiment catapulted me into a mixed state. Bianca up, Bianca down, all at once. Imploding and exploding, all at once. Collapsing, expanding. The widening Universe squirming inside an expired star caving in on itself.
/
Bianca, 28: That was by far the most dysfunctional trip back to California. My brain wants to erase it, so I will record it here. I trust I will find it years from now as an older, wiser self who will know how to process this. Hello. Are you here now? Have you solved my brain?
/
For 33 years, I had no framework for my torment. Vocabulary—a powerful reshaping tool. An agent of grace. Before Complex PTSD made sense of the senseless, I blasphemed Bianca with the rest of them. Crazy, overreacting, psychotic, irrational. Like that time I blew through California and . But someone you loved had died. And it was Father’s Day. And your mother had concealed her car accident, her totaled car, then said someone with powers healed her by touching her head so she didn’t need to see a doctor.
/
When Legion—the cave-dweller who slashed himself with stones—was freed of his demons, two thousand spirits flew from his body into a herd of pigs.
/
I am seeing my whole life the way one looks at an ancient painting restored to its original vibrancy. The Last Supper, revived after the fires. A miracle it survived the bombings that decimated the rest of the church.
/
Bianca, 29: Which came first? Everything falling apart or the feeling of everything falling apart?
/
Bianca, 22, Easter: I hate the tedium of having to go to bed and having to wake again. Death, resurrection, every damn day. My life is miraculous. My life is shit. There is something that doesn’t want me to be. There is something that wants me to be so much.
/
Possessed, Legion’s pigs charged into the lake and drowned. I have imagined this until it has made me sick. Bianca, flung from my body into a hoofed thing, shrieking as she sinks.
/
The highs, the plummets, all so fucking obvious now. My father, my aunt, my sister. How did no one notice? Why didn’t anyone know anything about it? The genetics of it. Its relationship to environment. Why was there no one to warn us? To help us? To prevent us from smashing our lives to bits with it? Why did we all leave her when it was her turn, when it was her brain cranking it up? [strikethrough] It wasn’t your fault. You were on the opposite coast. You were trying to survive. [strikethrough]
/
Boyfriend to Bianca, 21: I called, but you didn’t answer. I called the apartment, and C said you weren’t there, so I kept calling you, then C answered your phone and said they thought you were in the bathroom. They got the door open, and you were passed out inside. They called me, and I came over to check on you. Your pulse is fine, so no risk of alcohol poisoning. You’re just really tired.
/
Although N asked once. N who, next I heard, had died by suicide. In response to one of my blog posts: Has any medical professional ever told you they think you might be bipolar? And a link to José James’s cover of “Autumn in New York.” An update about his wife.
/
And M, who said to Bianca, 20: Imagine shaking a root beer bottle. You shake it up good. Then you open it carefully and close it really fast so it doesn’t explode. And you do this over and over until it can open without the soda spilling over. Or you try to do this, but it still overflows. Or you just open it without thinking, and it pours out. You are that bottle of root beer.
/
Bianca, 21: The rain screams down. It screams and screams like a child pitched down the stairs so hard she splits her head open on a jagged corner like a summer melon gashed by a stake. Ask me again about the weather.
/
I hear the diagnosis, but it’s like I am watching someone else’s christening. Bianca swathed in white and rolling her new name in her mouth like a Lemonhead. Too sweet. Bright but not bright enough.
/
Even with a miswired, misfiring brain, I did this. I accomplished this. Imagine what I could have done with your brain is a thought that has made [strikethrough] Bianca [strikethrough] me want to jump off the roof.
/
What is it like to sail through life with a brain as ordered as a map? My maps are printed backward. With cities missing. Cities mislabeled, cities discolored, cities scrambled to look like a pile of plastic alphabet magnets. Cities with Bianca Bianca scrawled all over like a hex. Cities zoomed in so outrageously sometimes I make out half a street name and still, I am expected to navigate.
/
Bianca, 25: A cloud hangs around the sun like a noose. No monsters under the bed this morning. They must have already snaked into my brain.
/
To save me from the sertraline, quetiapine. To pull me up, but not too up. My headphones, full volume, loop electronic dance music: I want it to be so badly, I wanted to be so badly, what you see in me, what you see in me.
/
And every now and then, a friend: And I kept thinking, too bad Eugenia’s not around, she would totally bring out Bianca and have her bitch-slap him for me. Then I missed your face.
GOLD
I’ve become
the kind of creature who, on Sundays,
fills seven small boxes with a bevy of pills
to stick it out another week.
When will I be fixed enough
to hear my kid scream without tearing
my father’s phantom hands off me?
How do demons, decades gone now,
still ravage me? Tell me
I am not the thing
my child will have to survive.
Tell me
the mob I inherited will not touch
my son. Yes, the cavalcade
of all that’s tried to kill me
may forever raid my brain, but know
this: in my mother’s first language,
the word for fracture, for crack,
is the same as the word for gold.
Every Thursday for twenty-one months
before my son was born,
a doctor trained me to put the gun down
and write. I understand
I am one of the lucky ones.
-from Bianca, selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Spring 2025 Guest Editor, Lee Herrick
Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of two collections of poetry, Bianca (Four Way Books, March 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014), winner of the Late Night Library's 2015 Debut-litzer Prize in Poetry selected by Arisa White, as well as a finalist for both the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets.
Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic, The Nation, Guernica, Poetry, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Tahoma Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Waxwing, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, the Best New Poets anthology, and the Best of the Net anthology. Poems from Bianca were awarded Poetry magazine's 2021 Bess Hokin Prize and received Special Mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she was awarded the Thomas Lux Scholarship for her dedication to teaching, demonstrated through her writing workshops with incarcerated youths and with Brooklyn high school students. Since her time at Sarah Lawrence, Eugenia has served as a teaching artist with a variety of organizations including Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund's group for undocumented youths, RAISE.
The recipient of fellowships and awards from Poets & Writers Magazine, Kundiman, the Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere, Eugenia served previously as a poetry editor for Kartika Review and for Hyphen, a news/culture outlet that celebrates the Asian American diaspora. She currently serves as a Poetry Editor at The Adroit Journal and as the Valentines Editor at Honey Literary, a BIPOC-focused literary journal and literary arts organization.