Image Description: An image of a black night sky with a full yellow moon and the silhouette of a person with wings flying in front of the moon.
By: Jessica Lowell Mason
On the walls, in the scrawls,
our mad voices bleed,
our heads break and our brains
scatter and splatter
back against the medical
records, horror’s paint
covering horror’s lies,
Jackson Pollock
died in 1956 but our lives
continue to be spattered
on the canvas of an industry;
we are only read
when we are dead,
when our deaths form
the last layers
of indecipherability;
we return as phantoms
in the ink where we were
made shadows, cast
into whatever the white
of pathology rejected,
dislocation’s demands
fill the buildings
that were our graves
with layers of vapor;
there is a tumult,
an earthquake only felt
by the broken earth,
that we recognize:
we speak the quaking,
aware we will not be
heard or seen
though our shaking
bodies will be wrestled
into stillness, this is how
we take back our corpses
when the latex armies
capsize our boats of resistance,
commodify our rage,
and turn our refusals
into invitations— as if they don’t
know the mad have wings
and our corpses fly.
Jessica Lowell Mason (she/her) is a White person with blonde and brown hair. She is standing in front of a black wall wearing a grey blazer jacket, a black turtleneck shirt, and a skeleton earring.
Jessica Lowell Mason is a mother, a writer, an educator, a performer, a psychiatric industry survivor, an outspoken social justice activist, and an advocate for women, girls, and queer/non-binary people. She is devoted to speaking and writing about issues related to cognitive autonomy and to empowering women while also working for mental health reform via community-based literacy and advocacy efforts. She started Madwomen In The Attic (MITA) with her sister after undergoing a severely traumatic situation at a state mental hospital, but sees MITA as an extension of her academic research and lifelong commitment to social justice, and she hopes that, in time and through the efforts of MITA and other similarly-humanistic organizations, nationally and globally there will be a recognition of the human rights of neurodivergent people and an end to the era of violence and human rights violations perpetuated by the psychiatric and pharmacological industries.