UAB Digital Commons (Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham)

Jerrell, Carrie

PoemMemoirStory (literary 
magazine) 
Volume 13 Article 16 
2014 
Love Poem for Route 66 
Carrie Jerrell 
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 Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons 
Recommended Citation 
Jerrell, Carrie (2014) "Love Poem for Route 66," PoemMemoirStory (literary magazine): Vol. 13, Article 16. 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/pms/vol13/iss2014/16 
This content has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of the UAB Digital Commons, and is 
provided as a free open access item. All inquiries regarding this item or the UAB Digital Commons should be 
directed to the UAB Libraries Office of Scholarly Communication. 
24 PMS. .
Carrie Jerrell
Love Poem for Route 66
I knew you from the womb. 
I grew with the ghost towns 
you ran through, but I recall you 
beautiful in your tragedy, 
trimmed in sinking trinket shops 
and the too-blue, unguarded 
motel pools of Flagstaff, Needles, 
Tucumcari. Every morning, 
you spoke to me through the tabloids. 
You gave me a new name: 
Meryl, Sigourney, Farrah. I fooled 
filling station attendants.
I charmed the diner waitresses. 
What is the sublime if not 
a bank of violet clouds draped over 
your horizon? If not the luxury 
of days spent gazing into landscape, 
inventing another life, then another? 
Oh Mother Road, Mother Road, 
where I saw my own mother, so often 
trapped in my mind as a cook 
in our kitchen, cradle a coyote pup 
the way she cradled my brother;
where I watched my father fire 
a pistol into the saguaro—
each day with you is a Rückenfigur 
still framed in my memory. How
blissful it was to be frightened
by you. How wild you made us
to ourselves, how wild to each other.


English

Love Poem for Route 66

Fujimoto, Naoko

PoemMemoirStory (literary 
magazine) 
Volume 13 Article 24 
2014 
Electric Bills 
Naoko Fujimoto 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/pms 
 Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons 
Recommended Citation 
Fujimoto, Naoko (2014) "Electric Bills," PoemMemoirStory (literary magazine): Vol. 13, Article 24. 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/pms/vol13/iss2014/24 
This content has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of the UAB Digital Commons, and is 
provided as a free open access item. All inquiries regarding this item or the UAB Digital Commons should be 
directed to the UAB Libraries Office of Scholarly Communication. 
34 PMS. .
Naoko Fujimoto 
Electric Bills
after the tsunami on 3/11/2011 
You are part of a white 
field under wet sweaters.          A tin 
box is tangled in your hair. In the box, 
there are electric 
bills that say, Have a bright day!          If
it is your spiritual 
message, I want to turn off the light. 
I need          a chair that my body 
drops into so I can dream about the smell of 
your neck. 
Somebody yells, Is anyone alive?
…no, it snows here and it is difficult to close my eyes.
 


Electric Bills

McKnight, Heal

PoemMemoirStory (literary 
magazine) 
Volume 13 Article 31 
2014 
Traffic 
Heal McKnight 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/pms 
 Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons 
Recommended Citation 
McKnight, Heal (2014) "Traffic," PoemMemoirStory (literary magazine): Vol. 13, Article 31. 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/pms/vol13/iss2014/31 
This content has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of the UAB Digital Commons, and is 
provided as a free open access item. All inquiries regarding this item or the UAB Digital Commons should be 
directed to the UAB Libraries Office of Scholarly Communication. 
57PMS. .
Heal McKnight
Traffic
The sun’s going down, sliding unceremoniously out of a newsprint-col-
ored sky, and the two of us are walking together past piles of grimy snow. 
Rennie’s boots clump against the sidewalk, laces flopping, and her down 
jacket makes a puffy noise each time she swings her arms. Otherwise, 
she’s mostly silent beside me. Her coat’s unzipped and crooked, her back-
pack a complicated bulge of half-finished math papers jammed in with 
her doll, her doll’s blanket, and her clothes from Saturday. We’re walking 
toward the busy street that separates my house from her other mom’s. 
Ren’s in second grade. She’s been growing out her bangs all year, but 
they still won’t quite stay tucked behind her ears. She pushes them back 
now with her mittens, and the static sticks them to her forehead, right 
in her line of vision. I hear her sigh. Seven seems to be a year of physi-
cal chaos, hands that suddenly struggle with pencils and shoelaces and 
other kids’ new glasses. A medley of baby teeth and adult teeth. A body 
between eras. She’s wearing fuchsia leggings with a white streak of sci-
ence experiment spilled down one side and a left knee that’s mostly hole. 
She believes they are beautiful. In second-grade terminology, ‘beautiful’ 
is something I’ve given up on understanding: it’s these leggings, the glit-
tery shoes Jasmine has for gym, a red plastic hair band so glamorous you 
have to walk differently when you try it on. 
We make this same walk every weekend now, back to Shelley’s by 
five on Sundays, and once a week after Thursday dinner. Most nights 
we run, Ren speeding ahead while I chase her, whinnying and snorting, 
and I wonder what to make of it. I can’t quite tell whether we’re running 
for fun, one last burst of muscles to close down our time together, or 
whether she really wants to get away and back to Shelley’s house, wants 
me to see how she looks as a speck on the horizon. Sometimes she looks 
back and sometimes she doesn’t; sometimes she waits for me before the 
last corner and other times she takes it on flying feet, and I have to hustle 
to catch up. 
But this particular time, we’re walking side by side and slow. “I have a 
plan for in case I ever run out into traffic,” Ren tells me once we can see 
58 PMS. .
McKnigh t
the house we all used to live in. “Here’s how it goes: I make it across the 
first half of the street, because I’m really really fast. When I get to the yel-
low line, I freeze.” She freezes, arms glued to her sides, her hands in sud-
den fists. “Cars going this way can’t get me, and cars going that way can’t 
get me. Nobody can drive on the yellow line because it doesn’t really 
belong to anybody. So I would be safe.”
I imagine the blunt city buses and family sedans, Ren stock-still in the 
middle of it all. Most side mirrors would whiz past her chin-high. I try to 
touch her shoulder, and she walks a little more quickly. “I dunno, Bub,” 
I say. “The yellow line doesn’t seem all that safe to me. What if you just 
didn’t run into traffic in the first place?”
“I would be safe.” Her teeth are clamped. “I would be fine.”
We wait for the break in traffic, and she makes the usual disgruntled 
noise when I ask her to hold my hand across the street. Once we’re on 
the other side she barely slows for the kiss I leave on her head. She still 
smells like a puppy. “I love you, Bub,” I say, from the sidewalk, as close 
as Shelley allows me to come to the house. “Have a good night. See you 
Thursday.” She says nothing back, just the slap slap slap of her feet, and 
then the fast bang of a storm door and the click of the porch light some-
body always turns off right away.
Shelley and I are working out custody stuff on our own, I tell people. 
We should clean up our own mess, I say, and Family Court isn’t exactly 
hospitable to lesbian families breaking up. I’ve talked to a lawyer who’s 
explained the terrain, most of which I knew already: If one of us were 
a man Rennie would be legally linked to both of us, whether or not we 
were both her biological parents, whether or not we were married—if 
we’d both acted like Ren’s parents, we would both be Ren’s parents. If we 
were a straight couple splitting, court would compel us to share Ren’s 
time equally. She’d belong in both households, even when those house-
holds don’t feel much like sharing. 
It’s not that way for lesbian families. Our state won’t recognize two 
legal parents of the same sex. So it doesn’t matter that Shelley and I 
planned Ren together, starting early in our ten years as a couple. It 
doesn’t matter that Ren’s called us Mama and Mimi since her first few 
words, or that she had both our last names hyphenated, or that until this 
last year we’ve teamed up pretty well even on the difficult days. The state 
statutes are clear: Shelley gave birth, so she’s the sole legal parent. I could 
59
poemmemoirstory
PMS. .
file a suit in Family Court, the lawyer said, burning through a few thou-
sand dollars just trying to convince a judge to hear our dispute. The best 
I can hope for, the lawyer said, is the legal designation “parent-like rela-
tionship.” I’d likely get visitation with Ren…it’s just that no one knows 
how much. That’s the big risk here, the lawyer said—once you bring 
court into the process, you’re bound by a judge’s decision. You might get 
a homophobic judge. You might be awarded time that’s only symbolic, so 
you could wind up seeing Ren just once a year. It’s happened, the lawyer 
said. 
So I tell people Shelley and I are trying to figure things out on our 
own, though that sounds more cooperative than it really is. Our beliefs 
about Ren’s best interests don’t overlap much these days, and Shelley’s 
e-mails usually end the same way—I am the legal parent. I will decide 
what’s best.
When I walk back to my apartment the sky feels one shade darker. Ours 
is the kind of neighborhood that smells vaguely like car trouble, a neigh-
borhood people drive through because they’ve discovered a shortcut or 
move to because it’s one of the last places they can afford a house. Some 
blocks are on a slow, halting upswing, but around the corners most hous-
es are still waiting. We’ve got fixer-uppers with soggy porches. Federally-
funded housing for senior citizens. A liquor store by the train tracks. A 
big blocky Vend-A-Bait machine out front where people buy nightcrawl-
ers for $1.50 in change before walking out on the railroad trestle, fishing 
illegally from the tracks, drinking illegally from 40-ouncers. I got the 
apartment cheap, the slope-roofed upper floor of an old house that gets 
good sun in the late afternoon. It’s a block and a half from where Shelley 
and Ren still live, just around the corner from her school, and when I 
found the place I pictured her stopping by on her way home, grabbing a 
snack, maybe asking me for a ride somewhere later. Or calling my name 
when she and her friends walk past on their way to the playground. So I 
signed the lease and settled in. The place is covered in fluffy carpeting, 
the variegated kind downstairs landlords put in to disguise noise and 
spills, the kind that when you first lie down on it, it smells like too many 
other people, but then quietly becomes the smell of something resem-
bling home.
I knew, but didn’t exactly want to know, that spontaneous dropping-
by might never happen and that Shelley would start requiring Ren to 
60 PMS. .
McKnigh t
take the long way to the playground. I didn’t know about my old jour-
nals, which Shelley photocopied and read to the neighbors, who told me 
later that they felt awkward about it but couldn’t seem to stop her. It’s all 
wrong anyway, Shelley says. The stuff you wrote about us, about me, she 
says, half of it never happened. The other half of it didn’t happen that 
way. All lies. I have proof. I’ve called lawyers.
I stayed for ten years. I stayed for Rennie, for the house Shelley and I 
fixed up together, because our time had started out sweetly enough, 
because in my Midwestern family we are mature about disappointment. 
I stayed because I wanted to do this right, to be an enthusiastic family 
lesbian, the kind people on buses smile at and librarians compliment and 
grandparents show pictures of. I stayed because moms stay. 
Then I couldn’t. Leaving was hard to defend after willing myself so 
hard to stay. But I fell completely out of character when I found I could 
imagine loving someone else and being loved back. When I felt myself 
falling fast. When I left.
I left over a year ago, in January of Ren’s first grade, when kids’ lunch-
boxes start looking worn, right after the second round of book orders 
on thin floppy paper, when teeth rain out of classmates’ mouths and 
get put right away into tiny plastic treasure boxes from the nurse. On a 
Friday after school I went to Ren’s classroom, scuffed and cluttered with 
the tools of learning, rumpled workbooks and permanent colonies of 
small scissors, an aquarium with a turtle on loan. I sat down near some 
construction paper projects about cells, listened to my own bloodstream 
in my own ears, and told the teacher what was happening in our family. 
Shelley and I are separating, I said. I’ll move out soon. Rennie will know 
this when she comes back on Monday. 
I watched her think about Rennie—maybe imagining the minutes 
I couldn’t imagine then, when Rennie would get the news for the first 
time, and then all the minutes before it would really start to sink in. 
“This is so hard for kids,” the teacher said. “She’ll need to talk about it.” I 
wished the teacher wanted to know more. I wanted to tell her how hard I 
tried with Shelley—or how hard I thought I was trying, because the try-
ing felt so hard. I wanted her to know about the trudging afternoons of 
counseling, the therapist suggesting I could just reframe things. Shelley 
can’t tell you much right now, said the therapist, so try thinking of her as 
61
poemmemoirstory
PMS. .
a foreign traveler, one you find really interesting. You like people from 
other cultures. Shelley can’t touch you now, she can’t be touched, so what 
other things could you count as touches? Smiles? We say smiles can 
touch us. Try that. You’re creative. 
So I told Shelley I’d try harder. It seemed like the only thing I could 
do. Plus Shelley appreciated that approach—it felt better than the slow 
and gluey depression, she told the therapist, better than all the times she 
could only feel bad about what she couldn’t say or show or feel. It was her 
first note of relief in a long time. And then I just couldn’t do it anymore. 
I don’t think there’s any way to explain all this to the teacher, though, and 
I’ve just heard the word “overshare” for the first time, and I don’t want to 
seem desperate. 
In two weeks, when I’ve moved into a friend’s spare bedroom, Shelley 
will tell the teacher that everything was fine until I fell for a woman at 
my job. She’ll tell Ren, too, despite our agreement that she shouldn’t 
know that right now. I knew none of that on the day I talked to the 
teacher.
“She’ll need to talk about it,” the teacher said again. “I’ll let her tell in 
Sharing Time on Monday, if she wants to.” I didn’t know what to picture 
when I tried to picture Sharing Time. I didn’t know how to tell when the 
conference was over, or if I was supposed to say more or less, or if there 
were cues I wasn’t quite getting. Eventually, I just put on my coat and 
thanked her and left.
Now, a year later, I see Ren for five careful hours on Thursday, 24 hours 
on the weekend. In between I see the woman from my job and she and I 
take things fast and hardly cautiously. We don’t work together any more 
but we sleep together nearly every weeknight, showing up at each other’s 
house at dinnertime with backpacks of our own, cooking together with 
the exuberance of people just starting out. We talk probably too much 
about Ren, what she’s said and who she’s becoming, whether she’s okay. 
We know how much better things could be. I read books about divorced 
families, about encouraging your child’s relationship with her other par-
ent and making sure she has a picture of your ex at your house, about 
attending the same school activities. My girlfriend reads The Idiot’s Guide 
to Stepparenting.
Shelley’s already changed Rennie’s last name, removing the part that  
is mine: “That name seems like a lie,” she wrote in an e-mail. “I hated 
62 PMS. .
McKnigh t
having to write it on school forms, because it seems like such a lie.” 
Shelley excised it one morning in her lawyer’s office, the same way she’d 
changed her own name at fifteen when her father left.
“That’s my new name,” says Ren, writing it large with a crayon the next 
Thursday. “Saves me time.” She’s not looking at me. She’s looking for 
blue-green, which recently took over for her previous favorite color, 
which was green-blue. “I don’t always have to write those two parts. Just 
one. That’s who I am now.”
“Shelley e-mailed me about that,” I say. Her backpack and her soc-
cer ball have already been altered with a permanent marker, my name 
replaced by a big black box. The divorce books say ‘Be honest with your 
child about your own sadness, but spare her details she’s not ready to 
hear.’ I don’t always know how to tell the difference. 
 “I feel sad about that,” I tell her. “I liked it when our names showed 
that we belonged to each other.” She finds the color she was looking for 
and pulls it out of the box.
“I like it. Easier for me,” Ren says. She continues coloring, rhythmi-
cally kicking the stool she’s perched on. “Anyway. You have a girlfriend. 
Shelley needs me on her side.” 
My ears feel too far away from my brain, so that my own voice barely 
reaches them. I say what I know I’m supposed to say, what our family 
counselor told me I should say consistently, even when I find it hard 
to believe. “You don’t have to take sides. I know you want to help. But 
Shelley and I will work out the stuff between us.”
“Shelley hates you.” She’s already yelling before I finish. “She loved 
you perfect and you left.” Her eyes—big and brown and the opposite of 
Shelley’s—look totally different to me when she yells. “That’s why Shelley 
never wants to even look at you again.” The last part comes out like a 
little song, her head dancing and her eyes focused just past me, powerful 
in what they won’t see. She goes back to the crayons.
We’ve been here before, where I feel sunburned inside my head. 
“I know Shelley’s mad. Mad that I left.” I’m trying so hard to say the 
counselor’s words that it feels like I’m not saying anything at all. It must 
feel that way to Ren, too, whose eyes are rolled toward the ceiling. “But 
remember what we talked about last time at the counselor? About people 
feeling mad for a while, and then working it out?”
“It’s not like that in our hearts, Mama,” Ren says. She’s coloring harder 
63
poemmemoirstory
PMS. .
and more defiantly around her name on the page and her voice is getting 
louder, sealing me out. “Me and Shelley, once we get mad at somebody, 
that whole chunk of our heart is wrecked.” Now she’s yelling. “Wrecked. 
It can never be used again. That’s how people really are. You and that 
counselor are wrong!” She stomps off down the hall, loud enough for the 
landlords to hear through the carpeting, and slams the bedroom door. 
The air feels dusty and dense and far too still. I hear my girlfriend let-
ting herself in downstairs—we’ve started having dinner all together on 
Thursdays, dinner and a card game, the same dinner always, new card 
games each week. I don’t hear anything from the bedroom—no kicking 
or pounding, no dialing Shelley’s number.
The counselor’s words won’t work for either of us right now, so when 
I go talk to Ren I make up far too much as I go. I say something about 
healing, about the rebounds I think hearts are capable of, even when you 
think they aren’t. I tell her she’ll be okay, that her heart will knit back 
together, though of course I don’t really know this. She is sprawled face-
down on the bed, absolutely silent. She doesn’t care whether I rub her 
back or don’t, and I have no clue about what’s happening in her head. 
Hearts recover, I say one more time. I want my words to slip quietly into 
her bloodstream, store themselves in some small secret place inside her, 
something like those tooth boxes from the nurse. Something she can 
open later when we’re all a little better at this. 
Ren interrupts to ask about dinner and whether my girlfriend is here. 
She leaves the bedroom, and I hear her saying hello. A chance to start 
over.
We have our usual Thursday pasta. Ren joins us in the kitchen, ricochet-
ing off our hips and laughing, goofing around with uncooked noodles, 
trying to teach us a new song they’ve been learning at school. We eat in 
the living room on a blanket spread on the floor, trying not to kick the 
milk over, trying to finish early enough for cards, trying not to always 
look at the clock.
Ren runs to the bathroom in the middle of the first hand. We get up 
too, carrying dishes to the sink. My girlfriend walks over to Rennie’s 
lumpy backpack, unzipped and spilling its contents on the carpet outside 
the kitchen door, and quietly slides out a purple folder. 
“I saw this earlier,” she says. “Look.” She points to where the last half 
of Ren’s old last name has been blacked out. She holds the folder by the 
64 PMS. .
McKnigh t
window in the thinning evening light, so I can see them: big letters in 
Ren’s handwriting, my letters, our last name in wide shiny pencil written 
back in on top of the big black box. “She’s trying so hard,” she says qui-
etly.
I hear water running, and we slip the folder back where it was. We play 
two hands of Go Fish before the last-minute scramble of leaving my 
house, and then Ren and I walk out into the flat grey night, around the 
corner, and across the street again.


Traffic

Grover, Mary

PoemMemoirStory (literary 
magazine) 
Volume 13 Article 36 
2014 
Love for Jumpy Insomniacs 
Mary Grover 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/pms 
 Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons 
Recommended Citation 
Grover, Mary (2014) "Love for Jumpy Insomniacs," PoemMemoirStory (literary magazine): Vol. 13, Article 
36. 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/pms/vol13/iss2014/36 
This content has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of the UAB Digital Commons, and is 
provided as a free open access item. All inquiries regarding this item or the UAB Digital Commons should be 
directed to the UAB Libraries Office of Scholarly Communication. 
103PMS. .
Mary Grover
Love for Jumpy Insomniacs
My father, a medical doctor, treated my first bout of insomnia, which 
came of anxiety over long division. (Remainders!) Instead of reading 
me a bedtime story or giving me a daddy-daughter pep talk, he pressed 
half a Valium into my upraised palm. “This will help you to sleep,” he 
soothed, handing me a water chaser in a plastic cup. 
One-hundred percent effective. And as I softly dropped off, I felt 
loved. 
Over the years, the triggers have varied—Paul Davis, for example, 
who never asked for a second date; apprehension over incipient cold 
sores; far too many chocolate covered espresso beans; fear of Charles 
Manson and Hannibal Lecter, fear of the SAT, GRE, and the IRS; any 
number of ABBA songs; the prospect of mega volcano eruptions and 
mega tsunamis; and most recently, in my 40s, the actuality of hormonal 
mega tsunamis. 
When it comes to my lifelong struggle with insomnia, however, the 
constant has been a longing for comfort from Dr. Daddy, whose early 
intervention forged a strong psychic link between prescription medica-
tion and TLC. Whenever I pop a sleeping pill, I feel the love. Also, I feel 
like a placated hysteric. Crying, in fact, is an excellent way to get a pre-
scription. Not that I have ever faked a crying jag to score drugs. In my 
thirties, after the death of my mother, sitting opposite a very nice doc-
tor, my complaint the insomnia of grief, the grief of insomnia—I wept 
authentically—and scored some Ambien. 
Whereas my very first dose of pharmaceutical TLC cradled me with 
solicitude, Ambien KO’d me with love. There were a few moments to 
sigh—Ah, such a nice doctor—before meeting with sweet oblivion. 
Looking down with tender approval, my mother also sighed with 
relief. Although she had not been a wound-up insomniac, she had wrung 
her hands a lot, especially whenever I got upset. And at that time of my 
life, I was very upset—in graduate school and unable to focus on my 
studies, motherless. In a way, the Ambien released us both. 
Soon though, my little supply ran out. Bedding down for the night, I 
104 PMS. .
Grove r
got itchy. The rattan chair in my room made Rice Crispies’ sounds. And 
my pajamas —how dare they!—kept rubbing against my skin. Melatonin, 
Valerian, Benadryl: useless. 
Over Christmas, the first without my mother, I visited my father, 
who was at that time single and alone in the house. I couldn’t find sleep 
in my childhood bedroom, even with its updated color palette of mel-
low browns. The wee hours wretchedly scraped along towards morning, 
when I emerged, raw and dazed, to find my father energetically cleaning 
house. The roar of the vacuum cleaner competed with “Bad Moon on the 
Rise.” 
 “Dad.” I tapped him on the shoulder. “Dad!” Startled, he switched off 
the vacuum cleaner. Creedence Clearwater Revival kept up the assault, 
and I fumbled with the stereo knobs to lower the volume. 
“The music, it keeps my spirits up!” he said. There was a note of 
manic cheer in his voice.
“Dad, I can’t sleep. Do you have anything?” 
He was off to the medicine cabinet. As he rummaged through his 
store of remedies, I nearly cried with anticipated relief but contained 
myself because I knew tears would have put him at a loss. “Ambien!” he 
announced, exuberantly pleased to help. “I keep it for trips.” He doled out 
three pills into my upraised palm. “Take half a pill at bedtime.”
I took a whole pill at bedtime. So lovely was my deliverance that I 
pilfered a few more pills before I left. Dad won’t be taking a trip anytime 
soon, I told myself. 
After my return home, though, I ran out again. Desperate, I found 
myself looking for love in a medicine cabinet that was not my own, 
perusing amber-colored bottles for…Zolpidem Tartrate! With a frisson of 
guilt and desire, I wrapped two tablets in toilet paper and stuffed them 
into my pocket. Later, as I put up a front of polite conversation over 
dessert, I fingered my concealed treasure—the precious—feeling all the 
while like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. 
My own corruption appalled me; I therefore devised more honest 
means of acquisition: Surely, a junket to the cheese department at Whole 
Foods could legitimately be termed a trip—at least that’s what I reasoned 
when telling one doctor, and then another, that I needed some Ambien 
for a trip. Supply problem solved.
Zolpidem Tartrate, however, can have unpleasant side effects. Some 
people who take Ambien or other sleep hypnotics may experience head-
105
poemmemoirstory
PMS. .
ache, dizziness, tingling of the tongue, unusual dreams, flatulence, and 
etc. Others, it has been reported, lapse into a catatonic state of arousal 
and engage in sexual acts with someone who is not their partner. 
While I have never had occasion to use this alibi, chronic Ambien use 
turns me into a brooding zombie, continually hung over from chemi-
cally induced sleep. Also, after taking Ambien for too many nights run-
ning, I develop a furtive and embarrassing relationship with a spit hanky 
because the drug gives me cotton mouth, inciting compensatory saliva-
tion.
I tried to quit.
I caved.
I tried to quit.
etc.
I staunchly removed the temptation, sequestering my stash in a 
friend’s backyard, under a flower pot where I keep a spare set of keys in 
case of emergency. On many occasions, deciding it was a case of emer-
gency, I retrieved a pill, my friend’s cat glaring at me with disdain as the 
scrape of terra-cotta downgraded my stealth. Then, before the neighbor 
children could go after a stray ball, discover the precious, OD, and make 
me famous, I repossessed my supply and reverted to zombie. 
There was, I confess, a kind of self-abandoned contentment in my 
depressed, drooling state. The truth is that I did not want to let go of the 
love in the drug, never mind the ill effects. The pills transported me to a 
bed in a house where the fridge was always stocked and the bills always 
paid, where I heard talk of mortgages, IRAs, and a need for new brakes 
but had the luxury to focus on more interesting things, like my bottle cap 
collection and the next episode of the Partridge Family. 
What finally gave me the willpower to abstain were ominous findings 
gone viral, first published in the British Medical Journal. A study found 
that people who took more than fifteen sleep hypnotics a year faced 
greater risk of death, and at higher doses, cancer. Even after pre-existing 
medical conditions were accounted for, the correlation remained signifi-
cant. While it is quite possible that Ambien eaters court death because 
they simply don’t get enough exercise or roughage, I am a paranoid 
believer, which keeps me up at night. 
Determined to kick the habit, I consulted several self-help books for 
the sleep challenged, which advised me to smell lavender, hum, wash 
my sheets, play the hypnosis CD (sold separately), and practice alternate 
106 PMS. .
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nostril breathing and altruism. I was also warned not to watch violent 
TV programs such as CSI before bedtime—though I prefer Battlestar 
Galactica, which threatens the annihilation of humankind in each epi-
sode but does not brandish such grisly corpses. The author of Restful 
Insomnia seemed to know that I am single, and her tip—“Cuddle up to a 
favorite old stuffed animal for comfort”—made me even more depressed 
than an Ambien binge. The Women’s Book of Sleep told me that it’s a 
bad idea to go to bed in my new exercise outfit (I agree). The title of 
one coercive book—I Can Make You Sleep—compelled me to resist with 
combative wakefulness.
The core philosophy of many such guides is sound, though: Instead 
of medicating, I learned that I should dissociate from my inner hysteric 
by calling it something else, since being called a hysteric is enough to 
make anyone hysterical. In this renaming and self-soothing project I was 
especially aided by Dr. Gregg D. Jacobs, who in his book Say Good Night 
to Insomnia introduced me to NATS, or negative autonomic thoughts. 
Those of us caught up in the insomniac’s vortex of anxiety are not hys-
terics. The NATS are to blame, as they “cause us to lose perspective, get 
locked into one-track thinking, accentuate the negative, and view stress-
ful situations in an inaccurate, distorted fashion.” NATS subject us to 
awfulizing and catastrophizing, for example, “If I can’t get remainders, 
I will never make it to the fifth grade” or “I am going to die without 
remainders” or “I am going to die with remainders.” 
In the first stages of sleep, I lose lucidity but not the knack for freak-
ing out; the emblems of anxiety simply become more absurd: Charles 
Manson smears ABBA lyrics in blood on the wall. Math problems on the 
GRE necessitate baroque calculations involving chocolate covered espres-
so beans. Such imaginings stir longing for Dr. Daddy love. But I heed Dr. 
Jacobs and “substitute more realistic, accurate thoughts about stressful 
situations”: It’s Charles Manson’s followers who slaughtered the Tates; 
therefore, I needn’t worry about Charles Manson, per se. Chocolate-
covered espresso beans are monochromatic, and problems on the GRE 
usually involve things that can be multicolored, such as jellybeans, of 
course, also hats, and threads in quilts. 
Scientific thinking in excess stunts emotional growth, but after con-
ducting some research, I have found that a scientific perspective can 
defang anxiety over sleeplessness. Now, whenever I wake up in the 
middle of the night and go into a tailspin of catastrawfulizing, I find reas-
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surance in a fascinating study featured on the Nova special, What Are 
Dreams? Patrick McNamara and Erica Harris, researchers affiliated with 
Boston University, found that the dreams we have during deeper stages 
of sleep tend to be positive and emotionally restorative, while those we 
have during REM send our cars careening off cliffs or else our moth-
ers into our bedrooms during especially private moments. It is perfectly 
normal that I wake from REM in the middle of the night, beset by dream 
demons. Because each sleep cycle is about 90 minutes long, concluding 
in REM, it’s quite possible to wake four to five times a night in a state 
of paranoid apprehension. Usually, however, I wake up in this state only 
once, since I can’t get back to sleep when I feel that an incipient cold sore 
is an apocalyptic event. But when this happens, I calm myself by say-
ing, “This is REM-induced NATS,” and then smear on the prophylactic 
cold sore salve I keep in a bedside dresser along with the Melatonin and 
Valerian. 
Also thanks to my research, I no longer feel isolated in my condi-
tion. I share solidarity with the hapless fruit fly subjects in studies that 
investigate the genetic basis of insomnia. Insomniac flies, it seems, carry 
a mutated insomniac gene (while it is aggressively senseless to call a gene 
that does not cause insomnia the insomniac gene, I try not to get NATS 
over it). Paul Shaw, PhD, in a particularly sadistic experiment, discovered 
that flies with the mutated gene are hyper-responsive to stimuli. To single 
them out, he stunned sleeping subjects with a bright light. Of course, 
while the insomniacs woke up and remained awake, the other flies soon 
dozed off, just as my father did whenever my mother would sound a 
nocturnal alert—often at the moment I placed my hand on the bedroom 
doorknob. “WHO’ S THAT!?” she’d shout. “I had a baaad dream,” I’d 
complain, piteously. Really, I had been lying awake in the dark, on the 
alert for the child-seeking predators that populated my mother’s night-
mares.
Insomnia may in fact be linked to a highly tuned startle reflex, which 
our ancestors needed for survival. Neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux, in his 
book The Emotional Brain, argues that it’s an evolutionary legacy  
to make ready connections between predators and the snap of a twig. 
Like early humanoids and my mother, I am hypersensitive to acoustic 
stimuli, above all when the rattan chair in my room makes the Rice 
Crispies’ noises just as I am drifting off to sleep. WHAT’S THAT!? I bolt 
awake, and then I have to tell myself, again, that the bamboo in the chair 
108 PMS. .
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is simply…relaxing? 
Ledoux, drawing upon the work of Arne Öhman, speculates that 
some individuals are genetically predisposed to anticipate threats, super-
prepared to acquire fears. I am certain that in prehistoric times, easy-to-
startle clan members acted as early warning systems while others, like 
my father, snored away in the back of the cave (or up in the tree or in the 
lean-to). Clearly, individuals who now identify as twitchy insomniacs are 
genetically, or at least temperamentally, chosen to ensure the survival of 
the group. However, because we are no longer prey for bear-sized hyenas, 
saber-toothed cats, and other large carnivores, our contribution often 
goes underappreciated. 
New research, though, provides grounds for vindication. Until 
more recently, it was thought that insomniacs who complain a lot suf-
fered from “sleep misperception”—the insomniac’s hypochondriasis: 
“I never sleep a wink!” was unconfirmed by EGG’s, which showed that 
whiney subjects had in fact passed through various sleep stages during 
the course of the night. But a study conducted by Maria Corsi-Cabrera 
and her colleagues at the Cuban Neuroscience Center shows that while 
self-identified insomniacs do cycle through deeper stages of sleep, their 
awake-state brain waves remain active, comingled with their asleep-state 
brain waves. These persistently awake brain waves emanate from the pre-
frontal cortex, the center of conscious awareness to external stimuli. For 
those of us whose brain wave patterns remain on yellow alert as we sleep, 
random pops or snaps emitted by relaxing furniture are hostile intruders 
bent on harm!!!
A predisposition to stay on edge in the middle of the night is some-
thing that our culture has pathologized. I maintain that sooner or later, 
this special capacity will be essential for the survival of humankind. My 
premonition was reinforced when, after listening to a talk by the cuddly 
and charismatic astrophysicist, Neil de Grasse Tyson, I was compelled to 
ask the following question, even though I knew the answer would surely 
add to my list of insomnia triggers: “What is the probability of a giant 
asteroid slamming into Earth and wiping out 99% of life?” 
“It’s not a question of if,” he replied, “but when.” (A kindred soul, 
he went on to talk excitedly about how at present the number of peo-
ple monitoring Earth-crossing objects is woefully small, the size of a 
McDonald’s staff.)
Jumpy types filled with prescient apprehension know that in the event 
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of a global holocaust, survivors will find themselves battling for scarce 
resources in a Mad Max dystopia. Yes, and alert insomniacs therefore 
need to keep the edge of their readiness keen. Sleep medication not only 
harms our health, but takes away our sense of purpose. 
Truth be told, I backslide and take an Ambien now and then (for 
trips), but most always, rather than taking pills to knock me out, I con-
trol my environment to persuade my prefrontal cortex that, at least for 
the time being, there is nothing to fear. A white noise maker has muffled 
my rattan chair. I recently moved into a multi-unit apartment build-
ing, on the top floor, where it’s difficult to gain access from the street. 
Neighbors on lower floors will most likely be attacked by marauders 
first, giving me time to call 911 and make my escape. My environmental 
defense system, which is external rather than internal, helps me to let go 
of the nocturnal anxiety experienced by the chosen. But I have it on tap, 
just as my fruit fly and human confederates do. Our day will come, and 
eschewing pills, we will be ready.
I still seek Daddy love from my father, but not Dr. Daddy love: Two 
years after my mother passed away, my father met a lively, generous-
hearted woman. When I visit, I am warmly welcomed into their home. 
Once again, he is happily married, but he is not the same. He has always 
had much to give in the way of support besides meds—sage advice on car 
maintenance and tax preparation, for example. But these days, he hugs 
me for a moment or two longer at the airport. And there is more now, in 
his smile. Age and loss have deepened its warmth, a balm to soothe what 
pills cannot fix. 


Love for Jumpy Insomniacs

Dundas, Heather

House Menu

Nelson, Antonya

In the Land of Men

Model 167 - chalk - sedimentary rock
SketchFab link: https://skfb.ly/puyDIhttps://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/rocks-all/1042/thumbnail.jp

Brande, Scott

Model 172 - chert - sedimentary rock
SketchFab link: https://skfb.ly/puyEBhttps://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/rocks-all/1047/thumbnail.jp

Model 125 - peridotite - igneous rock
SketchFab link: https://skfb.ly/puwFOhttps://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/rocks-all/1010/thumbnail.jp

Model 179 - micrite - sedimentary rock
SketchFab link: https://skfb.ly/puyGNhttps://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/rocks-all/1053/thumbnail.jp

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