“Sacred Ground” by Kristin Roedell, published in Lessons in Buoyancy, released in December 2025, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. To choose our nominees this year was especially challenging, for we published 31 books, including 1,080 poems in total. Among all of these amazing and moving poems, this poem continues to be one of my favorites.
Mental health is an issue that many people believe can be easily solved with a pill, not realizing the impact nor the pseudo-anesthetic state that can accompany such a protocol, especially long term. Kristin’s poem not only addresses this complex love/hate relationship with “meds,” but honors the inner wildness that doesn’t always want to be tamed, and does so in beautiful language.
Please enjoy the poem, and feel free to leave a comment.
Sacred Ground
by Kristin Roedell
Both disease and meds
will rob you of yourself
my psychiatrist said,
glasses suspended
from a necklace
brash as a trapper’s
trading beads.
I am strung by the neck
by every dose; I cannot
trade with anyone—
but I take the effacing pills.
I remember I chose
this compromised wellness;
It’s too late to choose anew.
To my lover, I say:
there must be a wilderness
at the edge of memory
and mind—
It will have its raw
untilled splendor.
If I grow silent,
believe I still thrive:
I’m blooming like cacti
in crimson petals,
I’m dreaming of oceans
asleep in the dunes.
Remember
I am remembering you
In every moment.
Then, let me be unwise,
and forget my pills,
I want to wander
the dark among Joshua trees.
I want to sleep with
the sand bats
that wake to hunt mayflies,
I want to nest with a peregrine
on a cliff’s edge.
Be kind
and let me go mad
beneath the devouring
moon.
from Lessons in Buoyancy by Kristin Roedell (The Poetry Box, 2025)
nominated for The Pushcart Prize by Shawn Aveningo Sanders, editor/publisher
