Summary

The title poem “Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient)” is a prose poem that describes the speaker’s experience recovering in a hospital. While their ailment is unspecified, the speaker’s words suggest that it relates to their struggle with substance abuse. At first they feel as though everyone has forgotten about them as they “sit patiently until invited to leave” (14). They then go on to consider their situation as relatively positive compared to those of others. “I am less horrible than I could/be,” they say. However, they admit they have “answered every cry for help with a pour with a turning/away” (14). Throughout their life, they have “given this coldness many names,” hoping that by doing so they would be granted some solution to it, but over time and without them realizing, it simply became an integral part of their identity...