One of Them

Dana Henry Martin
Dec 19, 2025
8 min read

By Dana Henry Martin:

In 2023, I spent several days at a psychiatric hospital in a Western state. While I was there, I saw a young man in his late teens almost die by suicide several times. His attempts occurred at irregular intervals throughout the day, every day. He wore thick, black frames and had dark, wavy hair that he swept across his forehead. He looked like a young Allen Ginsberg and had that same brilliant, shy, creative intensity. He showed me his art: drawings of the ghosts who followed him. Nervously and carefully, he laid them out one by one on the countertop at the nursing station so I could look at them. Each piece was beautiful and sad, like Carl Jung’s shadows come to life. This young man had access to realms most of us cordon off or refuse to allow into our consciousness.

I had San Francisco Poems, one of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poetry collections, with me. These places let you have literature but never religious texts like the Bible because they don’t want folks who are hyper-religious to become more hyper-religious. They clearly don’t understand the power of poetry or they wouldn’t let people have that either. Having poems available gave me something meaningful to read when I needed it most, as well as a place to write notes in the margins of each page.

I saw one with burlap feet

I saw one in a grocery store

come out with a pint

I’m reading the poem "I Saw One of Them Sleeping"* to the young men on the ward.

I’m going to call the young man with ghosts following him Allen. His real name is tucked away with the others in my copy of Ferlinghetti’s collection.

There’s also the tattoo artist who almost died by suicide after his brother died by suicide.

And the barely-a-man-still-almost-a-boy from Missouri who tells me all the things he’s done and asks me not to tell anyone. I draw an invisible loop on the wall and explain to him that healing is like being on that loop. Sometimes you’re right-side up. Sometimes you’re upside down, but it’s all part of the same path. He says that idea gives him hope. He smiles. He thinks things might turn out OK after all. Later, he’s so high from his medications that he thinks he’s flying. “Look at me,” he yells as he runs by, a blur of teeth and eyes.

And the teen who’d spent months institutionalized in Utah where “they can do anything they want to you,” he says, explaining that he doesn’t trust me because I live in Utah. He thinks I’m an agent sent to bring him back.

And the coder who got so weirded out by ChatGPT that he stopped thinking straight. “It’s taking over,” he says. “It’s going to take over.” ChatGPT is weirding me out, too, so we have a lot to talk about. Or we would have if he didn’t think I was either the devil or his mother. I’m struggling with believing my father was the devil, which must make me evil, so this apparent external validation of my thoughts puts a strain on things for a day or so. He later apologizes to the psychiatrist for telling me he thought I was the devil. It doesn’t matter by then. What matters is that we all survive being in this place that’s supposed to ensure we survive.

Allen tears all his bedding into strips one day and creates a noose before anyone notices. This is during the pandemic. There aren’t enough staff to care for the typical number of patients, and there are more patients than usual. The severe ward and less-severe ward have been collapsed into one so the limited staff can watch over us more easily. This makes things a little scary because “more difficult” sometimes translates to “violent.” There aren’t many ways to do damage, but there aren’t none. The ward-issued pencils are one way, stubby ones with no erasers like those at the computer stations in libraries. One of the women, who’s decided she doesn’t like me because I’m queer, threatens to stab me with her pencil while saying something about Sodom and Gomorrah. I call out for help as she runs in my direction, pencil thrust before her like a tiny spear. After that, all the pencils are gathered up and put away. I can no longer write names and other notes in my book’s margins. We’re given dull crayons instead. It’s not the same. The coder draws a rainbow and a love letter for the nurses. I should have kept quiet about the pencil threat.

Allen probably wouldn’t have been able to make a noose if the hospital had adequate staff. Having someone die while in inpatient care is the worst thing that can happen, not only for the obvious reasons but also because of the scrutiny that follows. It’s bad for the hospital, bad for business, and inpatient psychiatric care is driven by profits. I’d look up statistics on how many people die in hospitals like this each year, but I just want to talk about Allen right now.

I saw another come out

with nothing

I saw another putting a rope

through the loops of his pants

I continue reading the poem, impressed by the line break after "rope" and the sleight of hand it creates but worried about the patients’ response to that momentary tension.

I hope the young men will hear the survival in these lines. I hope I’m not triggering them. They listen intently. There’s a stillness that’s not medically induced, as if we’re all on a boat somewhere at night, like in the chilling scene in Jaws where Quint describes the feeling of a shark looking right into your eyes. The moment feels heavy like that, like it has mass, at least to me, but I’m an unreliable narrator. I’m a patient just like them, dealing with my own traumas, fears, and delusions.

We’re in the room where good things tend to happen, more good than bad. It’s where we gather to be together until something shifts, like a plate falling from a table onto the cold tile below. One of these shifts occurs when Allen stiffens, drops his head, begins clawing at his wrists, then tries to do the same to his eyes before two staff members suddenly appear and hold his arms with all their might. Until it passes. Until the ghosts are gone. It’s like a possession. He’s Allen one minute, saying he wants to live, committing to that, to all he has ahead of him and to the other young men who are hellbent on keeping him, and themselves, alive. Then he’s not Allen. His sole impulse is to not exist, to give over to whatever he feels and sees. Once, during recreation time in a room with a faux-grass floor and faux-grass walls, we were listening to music, loud, whatever those on the ward wanted to hear. People were bouncing basketballs and kicking soccer balls. Allen withdrew. He crouched down before bolting into the middle of the makeshift court with his arms raised to his sides. As if the lid had been peeled off the green box that contained us, he shouted toward the suspended ceiling, “Take me! Take me! Take me!” I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. It felt contrived, like a scene from a movie, but it was real. Allen wasn’t acting.

I saw one,

with a bird on his shoulder

I saw one of them singing

on the steps of City Hall

in the so cool city of love

I only read as far as the bird on the shoulder. I didn’t know that the next day a bird would hit the window of one of the common areas right next to where the young men and I were sitting, turning hope into fear, turning the world against the young men yet again. Allen is with us. “What does it mean?” he asks me, afraid. The young man from Utah thinks I might have done it, made it happen. This is a disaster, and not just for the bird who’s lying on the ground on his back two stories below, in the cold no less, where recovering from shock will be difficult if not impossible.

“This is really sad because a bird is dying, but it was just an accident,” I want to say. They don’t understand accidents. I understand that they don’t understand. The haze of delusional thinking is clearing for me, like walking out of a forest and into a pasture, but I can still feel it like humidity on my skin. I’m between their world and the one the bird inhabits—the outside world where things just happen and conspiracies aren’t the building blocks of existence and there aren’t ghosts calling us over to the other side. I’m suspended between the two worlds, which is why I also think but do not say, Maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe it was a sign. Part of me still lives in their world and is governed by its rules.

I leave before anyone else does. I’m in and out, thanks in part to my ability to advocate for myself—including my insistence on being treated with lithium—my quick recovery of my senses, my understanding of my rights, and my husband’s continuous calls to the hospital, which means I have someone on the outside who’s paying attention to the hospital’s decisions. In short, I have privilege. A name. A place I’m from. People. I have a degree of power that some of the others on the ward don’t have, like the nameless woman who was hauled in from a bus station or the woman who doesn’t speak any English or have any family. She’s "in and out" in another sense of the word: in and out of various hospitals, moving from one to the next. She’s essentially a long-term patient in an age where there are few long-term patients, only those in eternal rotation from one hospital that takes those who have no insurance to the next (and the next and the next).

I don’t know what happened to Allen. I think about everyone on that ward, but he’s the one I worry the most about. How do you end an essay like this, when there’s no end? Not for Allen, not for the others, maybe not for me. There is no "one of them," which is the point of Ferlinghetti’s poem. We can’t other each other or ourselves away. One of them is one of us, and we are all one.

I saw one of them trying to give

a lady cop a hug

I saw another sleeping

by the Brooklyn Bridge

I saw another standing

by the Golden Gate

The view from there was great

Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Used with permission.

Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Laurel Review, Mad in America, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, The Pedestal Magazine, SWWIM, and other literary journals. Martin’s poetry collections include the chapbooks Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press). Martin was born and raised in Norman, Oklahoma, and currently lives in Toquerville, Utah.