Depression by Patricia Wentzel

we went fishing that one time
Dad and I
used these little strips of lead

you could twist them into all kinds of shapes
weigh down the line
so it didn’t float on the surface in the sun
​
innocuous, commonplace
toxicity dismissed out of hand


Patricia Wentzel lives at the confluence of two rivers which may explain why she sometimes writes work that stirs the silt of social conventions especially around mental health. She has been previously published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the Light Ekphrastic, Right Hand Pointing, and has work forthcoming in the Cutbow Quarterly, the Tule Review and the Monterey Poetry Journal.