The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: PSYCH MURDERS by Stephanie Heit

Wardrobe Best Dressed
Image Description: The title, Psych Murders, appears vertically in large charcoal caps running up and down the page. In the center is a charcoal bipolar neuron with synapses. The nucleus is a black circle with an open mouth and chasm throat in red, perhaps screaming, with pointed white teeth like a shark. On top is the silhouette of a man with a fedora wielding a scythe at the neuron. Stephanie Heit is written in red ballpoint cursive on the lower left.
Cover design: Lindsey Cleworth
Cover art: “What I have learned (Bipolar Neuron)” by Chanika Svetvilas

This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from PSYCH MURDERS by Stephanie Heit (Wayne State University Press 2022).

content warning: medical emergency

I don’t remember the first treatment. I know I was inpatient with a blue sticky note NPO on the outside of my door so the staff knew no water or food. I doubt I slept much the night before. Probably scared. Or perhaps so apathetic I didn’t care. The room surprised me. Makeshift. Pop up. Box of volts in the corner. Electrical outlet of course. Anesthesiologist crammed in the rear. Monitors. A curtain more decorative than functional. Shit colored. Tile floor so the gurney could wheel fast in the event of an emergency. I am inside the event of an emergency. The doctor in white (I picture blood splotches for every ECT administered, each brain wave distorted—now he is red) probably reviews the procedure, slows the pace by a beat. Then sleep. Curtain over my eyes. But before, promises of Better. More fortune teller than MD. More crapshoot superstition than science.

Headshot of Stephanie Heit, a white queer disabled cis woman smiling, wearing a purple wrap, with brown wavy hair in a bob. She is on (perhaps in, feet dangling) the Huron River with background muted green of tree leaves, and dappled light before dusk.
Image credit: Tamara Wade

Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe territory in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her creative disciplines are fluid and inform each other in inquiries that delve into somatic experiences of how the body inhabits the page, words inhabit the body, and how the environment we place our bodyminds in stimulate new awareness. She is bipolar, a shock/psych system survivor, a mad activist, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her poetry collections are the book of hybrid memoir poems PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022) and The Color She Gave Gravity (Operating System, 2017).

Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief of beestung, Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.

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