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# One Poem by Candace Williams
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/one-poem-by-candace-williams/
- Published: 2016-11-02T11:00:26.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:41:49.000Z
- Description: Our new poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected one poem by Candace Williams for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
- Author: Wendy Xu
- Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:23 (2016, 2017, part 2)

![Mark Dion, "Memory Box" (detail) (2016) in The Library for the Birds of New York and Other Marvels at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (photo by Elisa Wouk Almino for Hyperallergic)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/11/2016-03-12-14-46-48-1-720xshadows526.jpg)

Mark Dion, “Memory Box” (detail) (2016) in The Library for the Birds of New York and Other Marvels at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (photo by Elisa Wouk Almino for Hyperallergic)

## When I was 12

my dad told the psychiatrist I suffer  
night terrors because I’m evading generations of trauma  
the heritage of Middle Passage was dismissed by science  
the psychiatrist dismissed dad’s evidence  
nodding *mmhmmm* I was prescribed  
a bottle of Paxil

and I swallowed my Paxil  
daily yet I suffered  
nightly the psychiatrist prescribed  
more doses to stop trauma  
from animating my body while I slept he stressed evidence  
recorded in elite journals of medicine and science

and years later, ancestral trauma was recreated in a science  
lab I flushed my Paxil  
after reading the evidence:  
Men in white coats electrocuted mice until the animals suffered  
convulsions at the scent of cherry blossoms this scent traumatized  
offspring who never experienced electric current Men in white coats prescribe

trauma to bury trauma they’ll excavate later my psychiatrist prescribed  
Paxil because he didn’t know why a 12-year-old science  
geek escaped her bed and screamed bloody murder in her sleep *The trauma* 
*must stem from chemical imbalance* he said *Paxil* 
*stimulates neurotransmitters* but he didn’t know my suffering  
is a transmission from the belly of *Desire* crossing the Atlantic There’s evidence

my ancestral bodies survived and did not survive this shipevidence  
human cargo was prescribed  
bondage and suffering  
because states need building scientists  
endorsed these prescriptions with eugenic theories my Paxil  
is evidence of trauma

inflicted by these white coats who are paid per trauma  
They gather evidence  
for cures by handing out placebos *The Paxil* 
*is a placebo* I screamed my psychiatrist prescribed  
higher doses and I became his science  
experiment White coats dissected my suffering

in labs resembling bedrooms they prescribed  
more Klonopin, more scans, more *mmhmmm*, more science  
still screaming: *I suffer*

*\* \* \**

Candace Williams is a Brooklyn Poets Fellow and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in *Sixth Finch*, *Bennington Review*, *Lambda Literary Review*, *Copper Nickel*, and *Redivider*, among other places. She earned her MA in Elementary Education from Stanford University and has received scholarships from Cave Canem. You can find her walking her pit bull down Nostrand Ave, watching too many episodes of *Murder, She Wrote* before bed, and subtweeting the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (@teacherc).

*Readers are encouraged to submit 3–5 poems as a PDF to Wendy Xu for consideration at* [*poetry@hyperallergic.com*](mailto:poetry@hyperallergic.com)*.*