the poster with claw marks on it

The Program's wisdom hung on a bedroom door as decor: the calligraphic poster and the old AA bumper-stickers that furnish the seniorest residents' room, the slogan (everything I've let go of has claw marks on it) naming the violence of surrender itself — that letting go, the whole recovery project, is a thing done against a grip that does not release willingly. The doctrine lives here as wallpaper, absorbed into the ordinary.