Voices on Addiction: Four Poems by Nick Flynn
Behind DOOR NUMBER ONE / is a hammer, to break the wings off angels.
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Voices on Addiction
Voices on Addiction: A Review of The Recovering
As recovering addicts, we must love ourselves back to the source, love our shameful bits and decimations and not just our reconciliations and resurrections.
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Voices on Addiction: Spontaneous Combustion
I remember hunger the way other children remember love.
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Voices on Addiction: A Conversation with Andrea Jarrell
I didn’t want to be edited in that way. I needed to tell my story.
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Voices on Addiction: Need and Smoke
Need had carved out specific contours in my personality, and then it returned like a curse to fit in those spaces.
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Voices on Addiction: What We Forget, What We Remember
I don’t remember when [my brother] ran away; I just remember him being gone more often than not.
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Voices on Addiction: Dead Eyes and Bob Barker Crocs
Broken people are drawn to other broken people. Comparing scars. Laying belly to belly. Two similar pieces of different puzzles.
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Voices on Addiction: The Taste Inside My Mouth
It’s never the words I remember. It’s their taste: bitter, dense, like biting into a radish. It’s how my body feels: sore.
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Voices on Addiction: Self-Portrait
Mother should have told me that booze made a kind of heaven in my body, I thought the first time I felt it.
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Voices on Addiction: Travels with My Daughter
I imagine the box of obsidian flakes and chunks at home—gathered from explorations in the desert. Their edges cut through skin, draw blood.
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Voices on Addiction: Zombie Nation
Sometimes life is so big and so loud and being a human being in the world is so much I feel overwhelmed and need a cocoon.
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Voices on Addiction: Keys
He wasn’t an alcoholic! He was just British. I was starting to think that this bullet was long past being dodged.
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Voices on Addiction: The Honeybee
She never stopped, a bee buzzing from flower to flower to flower, collecting all the sweetness she could.
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Voices on Addiction: Shame Is a Treble Hook
Shame is a treble hook that tells me that 1) I not only fail but am a failure, that 2) I not only damage people but I am damaged, and that 3) I not only lie but I am a lie.
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Voices on Addiction: Twenty-Five
I know that there are those who would argue that alcoholism is a singularly extreme condition, and I get that, but I’ve always felt clear that there’s a lot of overlap between alcoholism and plain old ordinary humanity.
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Voices on Addiction: Dynamite
The world is a merry-go-round, a sawed-off shotgun, a ticker tape. There’s no struggle now. There’s only darkness, breathlessness, exit—
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Voices on Addiction: A Bad Night
Trying to protect him from himself is like trying to protect atmosphere from weather.
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Voices on Addiction: The Only Thing That Has to Change Is Everything
The word rehab is short for rehabilitate, which means to restore to a former capacity. Like houses, I remember thinking. Demo the kitchen. Tear down the walls.
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Voices on Addiction: 365 Days without You
The men in my family don’t live long, you foretold. Damn you. Drunks and rock stars don’t grow up.
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Voices on Addiction: Surrender
Somewhere along the way, the salty fresh sea breezes of the beach are replaced by the drier, more metallic air of my mother’s neighborhood. It might as well be a different continent.
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Voices on Addiction: The Ghost Inside
But was I an alcoholic? The idea had never crossed my mind. The more I reflected on it, the less I understood.
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Voices on Addiction: Mother’s Day
I will always feel a little broken. Intellectually, I know her disease is “not my fault.” But I’m her mother. I will always partially feel the blame.
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Voices on Addiction: Too Much Hope
I wanted more time with him, but I didn’t want to hope. Too much hope will mess you up.
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Voices on Addiction: Baby’s Home
I got to thinking about home. What the fuck is home anyway?
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