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250-300 WORDS ON HOW YOUR RECOVERY IS HOLDING UP. ARE YOU TIRED? CONFUSED? DEALING WITH DIVORCE OR DEATH OR DISAPPOINTMENT? OR MAYBE YOU’RE JUST COOL AS HELL AND EVERYTHING IS NORMAL AND FINE FOR YOU. LET US KNOW!

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Those of you who read The Small Bow newsletter regularly know that poetry has been an important part of my recovery. Every morning, I read a poem as part of my daily journal and reading routine. This began in 2017, when I was working my way through early sobriety. I discovered a poem that I loved—Stephen Dunn’s “The Inheritance.” From there, I began to seek out more contemporary stuff, poems that I read for pure enjoyment. Poems that offered me recognizable worlds and helped me access some of the disorienting feelings I was navigating in early sobriety.

To better promote poetry and the poets who write it on TSB, I have tried to start a monthly “TSB Poet Laureate” series where I’ll feature one poet per month whose work I dig, and that has been an excellent complement to my recovery.

This month’s poet laureate is Megan Denton. I found her work in the Another Last Call compilation I’ve plugged in a few Sunday newsletters.

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Dream your father relapses
and checks himself into a facility
because he can’t take care of you and Emily
anymore. Dream your mother comes to pick you up
and suddenly you’re in her Mark III Conversion Van,
pine green, swerving down a narrow
canyon road and the van has almost fallen off
the edge—over and over and over—but somehow
bounces back to the middle of the road, cartoon-like—over
and over and over. And you and Emily are crying
and Mom says everything is okay
but you realize that she is also drunk
and she is laughing and there is no safe place to go
and she keeps drinking mouth wash
from tiny plastic cups with tiny plastic lids
and promises it’s not vodka. It’s Listerine.
            Dear one,
remember that all fear feels the same: right before
you get hit by a car, or when someone leaves you, and
I’d imagine—right before you die. Remember to swirl
around it in a clockwise direction with a lamp
in your throat. Remember that radiance will fall
on us all with the strength and delicacy
of lace. With heat lightning. With blue lights flashing
and your mother slumped over the steering wheel.
            Your father slumped over the steering wheel
in the dream where he blacked out for 3 hours—no, the
not-dream—where he blacked out for 3 hours and drove
through town, then hit the neighbor’s brick mailbox
so close to home. He was so close to home. The policeman
tapping at his window. Your father
in the back of a cop car and off to jail he goes.
            Dear one,
try holding on to the fire this time. Try pulling raindrops
back into the earth. Try thanking the neighbor
for not pressing charges. For keeping the secret.
For checking in on the children from time to time.
            Dear one,
are you still there?—those with pennies
who look for pennies? The god who hears me
when I cough? There is a reason for good juice
and toast. For putting flowers all over the house.
Must I ration my wellness?

Some poems come all at once—breathless, ungovernable, through the back door with no warning or siren. This is one of those poems for me. It felt urgent, probably brought on by waking from another dream about my father relapsing, which the first line references. Nearly eleven years sober now, this is a real thing I struggle with regularly.

My twin sister (the Emily of the poem) and I survived a horrific childhood and adolescence with two addict parents, which is the world this poem lives in. Staying lost in my imagination was often my safest option, but it required allowing myself to exist in a liminal space, one foot in the waking world and one foot in the dreaming world. The liminal space is where all the best ideas happen for me.

However, it is often eerie and disorienting. The poem finds itself in the liminal space between dreaming and waking and attempts to combine stressful real-life elements with warm, dreamlike qualities. There is a voice throughout that exists almost as God on the other end of the telephone, or at least that’s how I wanted it to feel. I realize now, a decade since writing this poem, that it came from a place of deep desperation, a little girl who needed comfort and assurance from God, who was on standby at all times.

This poem is for anyone who needed that as a child, anyone who can relate to the unpredictable nature of addiction, the back and forth, the cycle. I heard a quote once that says, “Control is fear with a clip board.” My father often talks about alcoholics being control freaks because they are out of control internally. Then I think about what his underlying fear could be. Then I think it could be something like, “I have failed” or “I’m not a good father.”

He is, on the contrary, a huge inspiration to everyone who knows him. I can’t keep track of how many people he sponsors at any given time. He’s devoted the rest of his life to prioritizing his living amends. It’s beautiful to see. Revisiting this poem reminds me that I don’t have to ration my wellness, which is something I never expected to feel, especially at the time this poem was composed.

—Megan Denton, Oct. 19, 2026

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Megan Denton is the author of Mustard, Milk, and Gin—winner of the 2019 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize (Hub City Press, 2020) and 2021 IPPY Gold Medal. She holds an MFA from Purdue University. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Adroit Journal, Sixth Finch, Passages North, and elsewhere. She currently lives and teaches in North Carolina.

ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN