Magnificent Errors

Sheryl Luna

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780268201821, 9780268201814
• eBook ISBN: 9780268201838
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Magnificent Errors is a collection of poems that shows how mental health challenges can elicit beauty, resiliency, and hope.

In 2005, Sheryl Luna burst onto the poetry scene with Pity the Drowned Horses, which quickly became a classic of border and Southwest literature with its major point of reference in and around El Paso, Texas. Now with the poems in Magnificent Errors, Luna's third collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, Luna turns her gaze toward people living on the margins—whether it be cultural, socioeconomic, psychological, or personal—and celebrates their ability to recover and thrive. Luna reveals that individuals who suffer and experience injustice are often lovely and awe inspiring. Her poems reflect on immigrants in a detention camp, a meth addict, a homeless individual, and someone on food stamps. She explores the voices of people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or PTSD, poets, visual artists, and people living in a mental health community setting. The author's own journey to recovery from childhood abuse and mental illness also illuminates how healing is possible.

The poems in Magnificent Errors are lyrical, narrative, and often highly personal, exploring what it means to be the "other" and how to cope with difference and illness. They venerate characters who overcome difficulties including ostracism and degradation. People who live outside of the mainstream in poverty are survivors, and showing their experience teaches us compassion and kindness. Ideas of art, culture, and recovery flow throughout the poems, exploring artistic creativity as a means of redemption. With language that is fresh and surprising, Sheryl Luna shares these remarkable poems that bring a reader into the experiences of marginalization and offer hope that grace and restoration do indeed follow.

II

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able
to give birth to a dancing star.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Shock and Awe

Tightened jaw, I did not love.

Flashback of myself jerked about,

legs high above my head, men

laughing, I came to sea drifts,

movement and crashing. I found I am

not so far from God exploding.

Gifting, a friend once said, is why we live.

Seven storks white and still on a gold lake.

My lazy eye glances back to that original

split, myself high above myself.

Whiplashed into forgetting, I didn’t know

hours from minutes. I was hyper-vigilant

for catastrophes: my head raging then numb.

The early garden bare, and now,

shocked with sudden memory,

I return to changing sky hues,

blooms of lilac bursting along sidewalks.

Lazy in the grass, I free myself of guilt,

imagine musicians in the park, us overcoming

ourselves. My eyes open before stars.

Holy these leaves, these skies.

What is torn

opens for light.

Neighbors Smoke on an Apartment Porch
Owned by a Mental Health Agency

Dazed with rambling gossip,

they are at odds with indifference.

There is their looming net of mistakes,

their love of rumor.

A gull darts over and behind

bare buildings. They all dream arousal,

shaggy forests, mountains, city streets.

Trees lose leaves, and one manic man

insists the leaves aren’t dying after

collecting outdated food at church.

Upswing in full euphoric force, he’s

certain he’s spreading world peace.

Oaks yellow. Rocks trap leaves.

Men at work lumber to dumpsters.

Their language bellows need.

Jehovah Witnesses mouthed salvation

Monday to Janice. She listened wishful,

but today relays her own bitter story:

lazy sister-in-law fat on a couch,

quarter-sized bedsores on her ass,

brother-in-law blind, stumbling drunk.

Hearts rigid and numb, they forget

crepe myrtle blooming pink.

Impermanent and frenetic worry hums.

Eyes grow glaucoma blue. Sucking

cigarettes and mumbling, they stand

hardy as an autumn day’s

geraniums, hard before winter.

Secret Missionary for the Virgin
Mary Off His Meds

He writes of grenades, a universe exploding.

It’s inexhaustible, the sky. Something about badness

turns him on. Passion, a candle with two wicks.

He says to me, “keep burning.”

He often falls out of love,

handles language like a theologian, misses

lilies. Lately he insists fall’s leaves aren’t dead.

His knowledge flickers brown-bagged, like rows

of luminaria candles at night. Seasonal

Affective, he deals with feminine questions.

He argues without hearing his own voice.

Within an occasional dream, he hears language

glide along the starched collars of men.

He will not let himself show sadness or joy.

He forgets the late afternoon lake

golden, geese calling out in droves.

No gang-banger, his past is a series of commitments,

seventy-four-hour holds, Haldol and Seroquel.

Now refusing meds,

he’s found the weather quite bothersome.

Wringing his hands to a fallen image of God,

he has a hurried urgency to be uninvolved.

Like a man in solitary confinement

in prison tossing shit to the guards,

he refuses to smile. Know-it-all criticisms of others

make his days. He cannot let go atheism or disbelief.

Electroshock therapy has him grasping at a forgotten past.

He walks lanky towards a loneliness he won’t refuse.

And the aftermath of madness is calm.

He tries to forget the dread of monotony and expectation.

We, with the same steps, trod towards some understanding,

some philosophy. All of us, keepers of secrets.

The Sailing Bicycle

A Russian man sandpapers the bark of a dead tree

seeking to reawaken beauty. Later, homeless in

rollerblades with walking sticks made of golf clubs,

tennis balls for each base, his head half-shaven,

he asks, “Where has my wife fled?” Blaming her greed,

he is a swarm of reflections. Sky huddles about him.

Rims of clouds pink at twilight, trees th...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• I
• II
• The Prayer
• III