Poem of the Week | October 05, 2020

This week’s Poem of the Week is “Dear BPD / Dear Impulsivity / Dear Intensity.”

Stephanie Bryant Anderson earned her B.S. in English and Psychology from Austin Peay State University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New South, The Normal School, Waccamaw, Nightjar Review, Passages North, Birmingham Poetry Review, and others. Currently, Stephanie is completing an M.S. in Mental Health Counseling.

Dear BPD / Dear Impulsivity / Dear Intensity

You enter uninvited in cells / in once healthy control / domains
sensitive for frontal and temporal lobe functioning. I grew you / like in
a petri dish / only this one is made of soft body, saucer eyes, and a
mouth made from his father’s. You enter me the way you entered my lover
like a garden of weeds / like a succubus needing another soul.
You nestle beside my son as if he owes you something, too.

Author’s Note

Borderline personality disorder invaded my life in the form of a lover: in the form of my previous partner, and son’s father, who died in 2016. I have seen so much of his father in my son that I often stay up at night gnawing and gnawing over how to help him. I feel that I have grown the disorder from my fear and anxiety — the petri dishes, my accidental conjuring, my this-hasn’t-actually-happened externalization. BPD has taken so much from me already, and, at times, I feel it is after my son just as, untreated, it took his father.