Awkward Years

[Lizzie]

I'm a little nervous to post a poem for the first time, but here goes ~

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Awkward Years -- I would re-imagine the title. There's a lot happening in the poem with hospitalization and painful transitions, and I think that "awkward" doesn't quite do the weightiness of these things justice. Unless you were going for deliberate understatement, and then I like it

I am twenty two and mania has abandoned me
leaving twenty pounds in its place, sandbags around my hips
and waist. I wonder
if the orange curls snaking from under my fast food visor
are secretly ugly
and no one is telling me -- I know the feeling well.
if the scars on my arms are obvious, or not,
and if the adult-onset acne taken home on my chin -- This is such a mouthful and doesn't read well to me. I'm wondering about the "taken home" bit -- is it something you took home from the hospital, or is it something that has made its home on you? Or both? It's not clear to me which you mean.
will ever fade back to freckly white. -- fleshing out (oh, puns!) the questions posed explicitly at the end.
I do everything for an audience, even this lousy poem,
and nothing in private. -- I think you could cut this line, given that it's already implied in the sentence above.
My internal dialogue is constantly dissected
by the part of me who "knows better", -- These two lines come out of nowhere for me. The rest is recognizable as symptoms or side effects, but this one doesn't seem to relate to the material around it, unless I'm missing something.
twice a day I swallow salt pills
and hope they won't kill me
before I learn to live, really,
and

I miss the girl I was
self assured in her social worker shoes -- I like how this line reads. Lots of lovely S's!
not buffeted
hospital to hospital
gurney to gurney
pills in her belly
too many, too many.
I miss hot days in the city
where the steam rises from the sidewalk
an aura of freedom -- Freedom is so abstract and vague -- it's hard for me to visualize what you mean by that.
riding the twelve bus downtown
past Voodoo Donuts. -- These two lines are good detail and mark you geographically. The only Voodoo Donuts I know of is in Oregon, but I may be wrong.
Now, all I have
is a dog and some daydreams -- I don't hate the line for what it is, but it feels a bit like singsong and stands out in a stanza that seems to be more about wistful remembrance.
visions of grandeur laid to rest
at the foot of my former insanity.
Who was she,
this girl with the shoes, the smile, the cardigan
half buttoned -- "cardigan half buttoned" is the kind of detail you need to go back and add more of to the poem. Add as many specific details as you can. This helps the reader "see" you and your world.
and where can I find her
and do I want 
to bring her home? -- These are the core questions of your poem, as I see it. I like ending with some mystery, but I also would love to see these questions addressed in the poem itself. Ending it this way does leave me with a sense of the poem being unfinished.

Thanks for sharing!