modern medicine (a.k.a. pill popping)
most days for breakfast
i have cornflakes, peaches and low-fat soy milk
with
three grey and pink capsules
which increase my appetite
and make my face round
and are meant to make me healthy
one yellow tablet
which makes me nauseous
and destroys my immune system
and is meant to make me healthy
and one white tablet
which gives me headaches
and makes me woozy
and suppresses the nausea
some days i wonder
why i bother
First published in takahē 41 (2001)
About Paula
Paula Harris lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she writes and sleeps a lot, because that's what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award, and was a semi-finalist for the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize. She was the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center writing residency in 2018.
Her poetry has been published in various journals, including Passages North, Barren, New Ohio Review, SWWIM, Gulf Coast, The Spinoff, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook and Aotearotica. Her essays have been published in The Sun, Passages North, The Spinoff and Headlands: New Stories of Anxiety (Victoria University Press).
She is extremely fond of dark chocolate, shoes and hoarding fabric.