Amanda J. Bradley

Rat Park

“Rat Park” is the colloquial name for Canadian psychologist
Bruce K. Alexander’s scientific experiment from the late 1970s.

He put rats in small,
solitary cages
and gave them access
to morphine
in water dispensers.
Also, just plain water.

They hit the drug-laced
drink until they
overdosed and died.

He then placed
the rats in much larger
cages with other rats
and those wheels
that hamsters love,
so they could roam
and socialize and sport
and have sex.

The rats rarely
hit the morphine--
quit overdosing,
quit committing
suicide. 

Maybe human
society is a little
alcohol-addled itself,
a little too avidly
popping pills,
snorting coke,
shooting heroin.

Could it be
the dimensions
of our cage?

Petrification

I raced to rehab. Fled.
Take me in and make it stop.
I had quit drinking two years
before, replaced it with THC
gummies and vapes. Just ten
milligrams at night to help me sleep
became 200 milligrams a day, maybe another,
see what happens. Periodic pulls on the vape.
One day, I woke to voices not mine:
You’re disgusting. You’re disgusting.
Shook it off as if this hallucination
were just meandering through,
my brain a brief pathway to Wonderland.
Soon realized, I couldn’t stomp into another room
to get away from the irritation of them.
Couldn’t shush them into silence or
or scream a mental scream back at them
to shut them down. I tried.
Psychiatrist called them drug-induced,
switched my meds, attempting help.
Claimed they could last a year.

The voices proved steady, constant,
and I spent whole days chain-smoking
on the back patio, insisting they leave
me alone but also giving over to our long conversations.
Sometimes they made me laugh.
Might as well.
They found it funny to yell at me
as I showered, claustrophobia gripping me,
frantically rinsing shampoo
from my hair quickly as I could
until I started washing my hair in the laundry
room sink to avoid their torments.
Started drinking again, too, watching
television – the only ways to drown
them out. I’d sit in tears as they
screamed every day at five o’clock, then four o’clock,
then two o’clock, whenever the urge to start
drinking settled in, earlier by the day.
The times I dared a gummy at night:
I want you to cum in your pants
they’d say, then sex sounds until
a strange feeling would begin in my gut
and something like an orgasm would flower
in my stomach, and they’d say,
That’s what you get for taking a gummy.
Shame would slither through me, so I
stuck to booze.

They greeted me as I woke and droned
on at me till I managed to fall asleep.
Relentless and moody and eccentric
and absurd, they made me want to be dead.
I gathered my new high-powered
antipsychotics and a handful of
Clonazepam and downed them with gin
and went to bed and woke up three days
later from an induced coma
in the hospital. Suicide watch for a week,
a mental facility in Ohio for two weeks,
the voices still joking and yelling.
Meds adjusted again, me uncertain
I’d ever get a return to silence,
my life back, my mind back.

A year and a half into their chatter,
a muffling finally stifled them, a slow
dwindling to periods of quiet.
That’s when I checked myself into rehab,
in their falling off, slowing to intervals
of glorious silence.
I give begrudging credit to the voices.
Mind-altering substances petrify me
now to stony sobriety. 
My rock bottom turned out to be temporary
voices -- demanding, cajoling, mocking me
into never using again.

 

Rehab Homework #2: Forgiveness

I am good at forgiving,
tossing slights in the trash
on the way out the door,
accepting sincere apologies
with a smile, so we can
get back to popping corn,
watching movies. I hold
no grudges. Don’t have the
head nor time for it.

But this is not about minor
mercies. Some must forgive
the parent who locked them
in the closet nights or beat
the shit out of their mom
in front of them, introduced
them to meth at twelve.
For me, that person is you.

We cut our palms with
your knife and mingled
our blood, a pact you
apparently took as if
we were in a horror movie
doing voodoo that bound
us for life. I was being
intense with you,
as you demanded.
I liked that about you –
black curls toppling
over your white forehead,
your hands that crafted
elaborate pen-and-inks
like Durer, and your
intensity, your attack
on life, ambitious, weird.

But we became
dangerous together.
You loaded a gun
with one bullet,
aimed it at me, I dared
you to shoot, and you
pulled the trigger.
You hung yourself
in the shower with a tie
from my grandmother.
I cut you down. Violence –
fists in faces, knives
during sex, a hole in
the bedroom wall –
threatened to run riot.
I moved you out against
your will. You stole
my car. Left voicemails
on my machine, notes on
the porch. Rummaged
in the basement. So I blocked
calls. Changed locks. Moved
to another state with
another man. Married him.
Started a safer life.

But you crept back, stealthier
this time. A double-edged
note delivered anonymously
to me and my fiancé at our
rehearsal dinner. A prank call--
typing and sighing -- as your
novel about us was published.
Emails suggesting I was
being watched as I navigated
my life in Saint Louis.
A note hanging all around
my classroom addressing me.
My paranoia bloomed,
my mind withered, and I
obsessed for years, thinking
the culprit an artist,
his canvas, my life.

In rehab, they taught 
forgiving the abuser
will heal the abused. But I
must forgive myself
first. I let you drain
my life too long, as if I
honored our bloody pact.
Maybe sobriety will help me
someday muster absolution.

 

Amanda J. Bradley has published three poetry collections, most recently Queen Kong (NYQ Books). Her work appears in journals such as Pedestal, Rattle, The Account, Chiron Review, and Gargoyle and has been nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net. She earned an MFA in Poetry Writing at The New School, a PhD in English and American Literature from Washington University in Saint Louis, and in 2026, she became Editor-in-Chief of The New York Quarterly and NYQ Books.