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 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

by Alec Finlay ratio of the possible limit : limitless some live their lives in (brackets) while others dash– the concept of visibility is the summit invisible illnesses are the clouds our hands can sign the names of the mountains gathering new meanings with our fingertips someone who runs up mountains can learn from those who only sit and gaze we have a right to altitude to hold our heads above the clouds someday we all sink back to our resting view if all meaning is a trans

side effects to talking  my voice loses its balance. words get tired, they slur. they become a mess of sound. unpronounced. my vocal cords seize. my brain no longer understands the english language. my tongue becomes languid, falls into a coma. my voice box closes its doors. my esophagus has a twelve verbatim pile up. i swallow the dead and the injured have amnesia. side effects to spasms or ticks, or tremors. my head jolts to the left three times in rapid motion. the stars m

Naturally Green of pine before blue of sky. Then what. Perhaps something important : what happens next is for you to decide as the sunlight bombards the earth and the earth in turn releases infrared energy that makes my skin feel almost too warm. I could think about anything I manage to think about and still the basket of my heart would l lose precious contents. I could ask am I here or not here and still inconsequentiality would bloom. What does it mean to matter. Is this al