Posted on | Poetry

Ward

Window:what allows you to see out
what separates you from what you see
your only chance
Ward:to keep away
to safeguard
guarded place you are kept
Touched:honored
possessed
violated
See someone:a lover
a therapist
a hallucination
Murder:crows
a dying
Institution:me and all my friends
a dying
Form:a body
a set of rules
a set of empty spaces to fill out at the front desk
Derange:to go crazy
to finally leave a restricted range
Commitment:you’re staying
you’re staying
Chronic:lasting forever
not dead yet
Cavity:an emptiness
a failure to care for yourself like a child
no toothbrush allowed

Rob Macaisa Colgate (he/she/they) is a disabled bakla poet and playwright. A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts and 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, he is the author of the poetry collection Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025) and the verse drama My Love is Water (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025). The managing poetry editor at Foglifter, he lives on the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires in what is commonly known as Chicago.

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