Poem Of The Week - Lavendar by Joanna Fuhrman

Before we get into it, I want to give a trigger warning as there is a reference to suicide in the final stanza.

Lavendar

by Johanna Fuhrman

"Being in a funk" is what the cool people call it.

It's the purple that surrounds the scene at the lake. Not sad enough to actually drown.

You say, 'Tm in a funk," and I think you think you're too pretty, too well groomed, too stylishly disheveled, to actually sulk.

Have you ever tried drinking a milkshake with a girlfriend in a funk?

She just stares at the straw as if sucking on it would allow the whole world into her mouth.

When a teenager wears baggy sweatpants all February, her math teacher may ask her if she's in a funk.

(She's actually just pissed off.)

Frogs don't get into funks, but toads do.

In the Bible, Abraham thought Sarah was in a funk, but she was actually shaking with grief.

When her baby arrived, her 100-year-old flesh quivered like a sliced papaya.

There is nothing funky about being in a funk.

The Polish biochemist Casimir Funk invented vitamins.

How long can you hold on to a mummified cat

when the the building is already burning?

Sometimes I just want to use my own hands.

The golfer Fred Funk wore a pink skirt to settle a bet with Annika Sörenstam.

Doing cartwheels or changing the bed sheets are suggested cures for getting out of a funk.

To be in a funk is to want to cry, but to be unable to access tears.

To be in a funk is to be unable to hear the music in the subway's rattle.

If Virginia Woolf had been in a funk, she would have filled her pockets with dead lilacs instead of rocks.

I'm finding it hard to put into words why I like this poem so much if I'm perfectly honest.

I mean, I guess the most striking thing to me is that the poem lists all the plausible definitions of being in a 'funk'. Right off the bat, the poet actually calls into question how some people treat mental illness as a trend. But then the speaker kind defines a 'funk' as sulking, anger, grief.

Then right at the end, the speaker says 'To be in a funk is to want to cry, / but to be unable to access tears.' There is a seriousness and darkness throughout the poem but this line really hammers home the type of 'funk' the poet has been referring to all along.