Janelle Cordero
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Nuthouse
​
We’re all one shitty day away from the nuthouse, he says as he lifts the shimmering
Coors Lite bottle to his lips, his hand just barely trembling. He’s been to rehab three
times on his dad’s dime, and he’s finally learned to stick with beer now that his dad
has been dead for two years. I think of the abandoned asylum out in Medical Lake
where, once the psych ward shut down, a Westside university funded a breeding
facility for monkeys. Scientists injected the animals with AIDS before testing
experimental treatments and drugs. I think of my great grandmother who spent
most of her adult life locked up in some brick building in the countryside for
hysteria back in the early 1900s. She probably just had OCD, like I do. She was
probably just a woman who got sad sometimes, or angry, or too fixated on one thing
to care about brushing her hair or fixing lunch for her husband and the kids. Maybe
she said something so unforgivable that people decided she was crazy—the truth is
like that. I see her standing at the window, dark hair down to her waist, the same
hazel eyes as my mother and the nose with a hump at the bridge, the upper lip a bit
larger than the bottom. It didn’t matter that she was beautiful, or maybe it did.
Maybe the orderlies pitied her more, touched her shoulders and back and arms
more than they needed to, unafraid of her mind because her body, her body was
something they understood.

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Janelle Cordero is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in Spokane, WA. Her writing has been published in dozens of literary journals, including Harpur Palate, Autofocus and North Dakota Quarterly, while her paintings have been featured in venues throughout the Pacific Northwest. Janelle is the author of four books of poetry, including Impossible Years (V.A. Press, 2022).