Issue 1

by Christine L Roland Christine L Roland is a Florida-based writer living with fibromyalgia. She teaches creative writing to high schoolers and is the former Editor in Chief for The Talon Review . Her creative work has appeared in Hellbender , Five on the Fifth , and Ignatian Literary Magazine , centers around themes of identity and agency, and invites readers to explore life’s perplexities via introspection.

by Sage Ravenwood I feared going deaf and then I did. Terrified of losing sight. Deaf already haunts my bones. Fear feeds a quiet madness for simple things. Simple non-threatening, precautionary, better safe than sorry; I’m sorry, I’m deaf – eye exam things. Today. I’m the first deaf client the optometrist has seen. Not helping. What an honor. I was fine , really. How many ways can you say deaf. I can’t hear you if I can’t see you, if I can’t, if I can’t speak because this qu

by Ash Trebisacci Ash Trebisacci (they, them) is a writer and higher education professional whose work has been featured in The Offing , Hunger Mountain , and Cleaver Magazine , among other places. While many doctors have prescribed yoga to cure their chronic pain, they have found a combination of acupuncture and testosterone to be the most helpful. Find more of their work at ashtrebisacci.carrd.co .

Absence, 1999 I almost failed the fifth grade I missed so many days out sick a head full of congestion still not sure why I hadn’t learned yet that old school was full of dust and mold and mildew my yet-to-be determined allergies one day when feeling good enough to go the teacher across the hall wasn’t there the class of children hushed and the next day she wasn’t there again my friend Adam on the playground he told me she killed herself

Silver Lake was it silver or gray, when we staggered west toward the wilderness? A cabin for a weekend, no reception, just you and I and the firs and the ryegrass field blotted with rusted skidders did it rain all night as we laid on our sunken mattress, not speaking? I thought I heard something. Some moonlit animal slithering. Mostly I remember the amphibious clouds the hollowed stumps, a wrung-out loneliness uncoiling It’s a strange thing— all this breaking down only

Body Breaks and Vows Holding you closer while the body breaks Helping you find your feet while I lose my way Handing over a life Hunched and crumbling by disease I have had more years in a disabled body and you are so new to it So confused Holding you closer while the body breaks Helping you find your feet while I lose my way Handing over a life Hunched and crumbling by disease I have had more years in a disabled body and you are so new to it I want to

Hanging Gilded Girls My parents hang portraits of girls who don’t exist. There I am above the bedside stand at five years-old, my dead name embroidered down my dress like a scar. My daughter, my bold one who spends the summer shirtless hangs across from me framed in gold beside the dresser. A hat obscures her face. She’s just a blue gown and hands holding flowers I don’t like that picture my mother sa

The Path of Needles I lay down in bed a little damsel and woke a grandmother. In between: the damp flash of a life I could not wish for or remember. My body soured, a stone fruit sucked clean to the pit. I liked the bright taste of it. I liked the knowing of it, that a pit is not a nothing but a seed. I sewed myself into the sheets and then I rose, the story’s ghost. When the wolf yawned, I plucked his teeth and with them devoured the rest of him, furred and whole. Then

The Body, Electric I will explain. Unlesioned, a spinal nerve produces move- ment, sensation, & (some would say) autonomy. Lesion- ed, on an M R I, it produces light. A miracle—...

Fey I love that word. It might be my favorite monosyllable, how it survives against all connotations of affected, or more to the pointed finger, “disordered in the mind (as one about to die),” “of excitement that presages death,” as if this dig could be applied to such light or lightened spirits. Spirits almost elsewhere, almost away from the trod, the treadmill, the traditional trudge; all the tr- words that trees welcome one back from. Back from trying the world and finding

by Rita Maria Martinez I worried about Jill from QVC who sold holiday finials, certain on air she’d succumb to a spiky peak rending ligament and cartilage from her dainty hand. When Jill retired, I was relieved. Spiky objects scare me. On bad mental health days I sometimes recall a scene from a Charles Bronson movie: a terrified nude woman jumps through a third-story window and is impaled by a spiky fence. On the worst mental health days I am that woman. M

by Leonore Wilson True knowledge comes down to vigils in the darkness: the sum of our insomnias alone distinguishes us from the animals and from our kind. What rich or strange idea was ever the work of a sleeper? E.M.Cioran, A Short History of Decay (1949) I longed for touch health longed for a thimble of breath of fallow deer red-shouldered hawk coyote’s call of poured out prayer I lived root

by Sonya Huber We have two broad categories to describe illness and pain: acute and chronic, which seem to mark opposite ends of a spectrum, an either-or, implying that what is chronic is not acute. The narrative of acute action grips us: the bite of the snake and the reeling backward in sudden agony, and a “riveting story of a quick injury seems to demand speedy redress.” 1 Branding a condition like loneliness as an “epidemic” is a desperate attempt to gain attention in ou

by Jacqueline Doyle In the dream, Mom and I are arguing about my aunt Maddy. Again. I’m tense, my chest tight. Which story has my mother just told? The one about Maddy pilfering change from her purse as a teenager? Or some expensive purchase Maddy made? “My little sister just never understood the value of a dollar.” I seem to have entered this scene in the middle and missed the beginning. The scene is familiar enough. We were always arguing about Maddy. Mom and I sit at oppo

by Gloria Ogo They taught me to name my body by what it lacked as if absence were the truest form of truth. But I have learned to measure myself in constellations instead. Every scar, a planet. Every brace, a ring of Saturn. Every pill, a prayer orbiting some soft interior moon. The world says: overcome . But I say: become . I say the revolution is not in walking again, but in staying still and making stillness holy. My wheelchair croons like a hymn. My cane speak

When You Said “Do You Meditate” I Heard “Medicate” and proceeded to overshare, pharmaceutical this and that, monoclonal antibodies and the chances of receiving them. I have not meditated in months, though during the shutdown, I did it every morning – and I painted, colored in adult coloring books, collected stones on long walks. I read the Bible again, listened to old favorite songs, anything to achieve that magic calm. I confess now that I am terrible at meditation, fail at

by Alizabeth Worley is the first thing someone says to me, when finally, I dress, put on shoes and compression stockings, gather my phone, keys and wallet to drive to some event or another, after what has been most likely years since last we spoke. How do I explain? When I go home, I will barely be able to leave my bed even to grab juice or a bowl of cold veggie roast from the fridge for days, and that is if our meeting is short, an hour or less. This week, I will not take my

the poem does nothing for me. i feel cut off to a certain type of thinking. i am afraid. the poem tells a story, shares a moral, builds a metaphor. i am falling back into exhaustion. sometimes this hum comes back and i think i can read poems again. the truth is that something in me died and i cannot resuscitate it. this has been true many times in my life. change is the only constant. sometimes the hums returns and i think i’m coming back to life, think the pain is gone, thin

The Fifth Day of the Cruelest Month Stand with brittle bones and feel this day ticking like a cardinal’s morning call. You are the gloss, the bill, the pinkish feet. You are also the empty crop, the stomach lined with plastic, the glorious cloaca waiting to pass eggs. Into the world, a miracle and another, each pigment- speckled. Lizards make their way to rock, their bodies nearly black in the still-cold air. They look like burned human parts separated from the whole. But tha

by Katie Darby Mullins Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is a disorder that affects the connective tissues in the body, which, in the author, causes hypermobility at every joint she’s found and contributed to a stroke she had in January 2017. How old was I when I became you When my body/broken learned How to slide pieces together While the brain— me?— Made sure no one noticed? “Your Memory is not my memory,” My friends say, my family. Of course. I didn’t want you to know. In fact, I was