NICK GARDNER, “VISITING Ohio, Home,” FEATURED IN THE TENTH-ANNIVERSARY ISSUE OF THE OCEAN STATE REVIEW

Visiting Ohio, Home

If you are leaving, lock the door behind
you. Keep the Midwest in mind, a home, left on
as lights (the shadows moving through the blinds.
You see, just shadows creeping into dawn)
On visits, you pack heat, a knife, three rounds:
for pride, for heart, for strife. Go soon, it’s night
and dark is blind as fear, dark with no sound
(You hear a pop pop pop) No chance of flight.
But if you think it not a crime to curse
at moons beneath the bridge below fourth street,
at moons that are dilated eyes, you must
know, eyes more innocent than mine have seen
me approach death four times, but now look to me.
Without a common tongue, we silently leave.

Notes on “Visiting Ohio, Home”

In 2016 I was only three years clean and had moved back to the city where I used hard drugs from the ages of about 15-24. My earliest years of sobriety I felt cooped up, uninspired. But by then I had a couple clean friends and we shook boredom with urban exploration. We broke into abandoned buildings and studied our town’s history rubbled in the remains.

That same year I planned to write a series of 100 sonnets, two a week from January till December. I wanted a poetic and over-honest account of my experiences with addiction and recovery that would also consider the moral complexity of abandon and revitalization in the Rust Belt. I wanted to contemplate the structure of my new sobriety, the way I tore myself down throughout six months of rehab and rebuilt a more stable person. As my city underwent a revitalization of its own, I too sought out a new vitality. I had to determine which structures in myself deserved rebuilding or demolition as I redefined my life.

The sonnet structure was the natural choice for me because my focus was on structures. On the page, I built my sonnets top-down like tiny boxy apartments or big boxy factories. But then, with editing and time, I broke the Iambic pentameter with trochees which felt reminiscent of the way a brick falls out of a wall or a window is shattered, or a moment of doubt disrupts my will to lead a clean life. I found a repetition such as the “pop pop pop” of a gunshot forms a catch in the rhythm. It breaks the structure. It wants to ruin the poem, the wall, the person. I began each sonnet as a stickler of structure, but I hate being confined, so I broke the structure and eventually redefined the poem in a way that made sense.

When I pieced together the sonnets from this project into my collection, So Marvelously Far, I ended up removing this particular piece because it was too similar to others in content, but also because it was so different, formally. It was the first sonnet I wrote for the series which means it’s also the one most rewritten and edited. It’s also necessarily messy. The punctuation often ruins the flow. The parenthetical on line three interrupts a sentence and forces an end stop rhyme within its little parenthetical cage. Though many of the poems from this series are interrupted by punctuation and juxtapositions, “Visiting Ohio, Home” works much harder to reject the natural rhythm of the pentameter. This is necessary because the poem compares two places, two rooms, two homes, one in which we are locked inside and another which cannot be entered. When I moved back to my hometown, with all its memories and guilt, the challenge was to find a solace in that mess, to build a house around it, and decide whether I was in or out.

Nick Gardner is a writer, teacher, and recovering addict. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English from The Ohio State University in 2017 and an MFA in fiction writing from Bowling Green State University in 2021. His novella, Hurricane Trinity, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in 2023. He has published one book of poetry, So Marvelously Far (2019), through Crisis Chronicles Press , and his chapbook Decomposed (2017) is published through Cabin Floor Esoterica. His poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Epiphany, Reckon Review, The Atticus Review, Ocean State Review, Fictive Dream, Trampset and other journals. In his ninth year of recovery from opioid addiction, his research involves drug use, abuse, as well as alternative recovery methods. He has won awards in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry from The Ohio State University in Mansfield and received grants from PEN America and The Elizabeth George Foundation. He lives in Ohio and Washington, DC. Read more at https://nickreesgardner.com/