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Going Blind
Kirstyn Smith
I still dream Crayola:Scarlet, cherry, candy apple;
Zeus’ breath, Antiguan shallows, Atlantic turmoil, August twilight;
Green sings lime, martini olive, cypress, spring meadow, life.
When I woke up this morning, I wanted to turn over.
Of course, you feel the same way.
I had a dream about cleaning my fingernails. I had this beautiful, shiny silver file and I
could see the brown of the dirt. Peach, compost, and ivory. Each nail suffered caked mud
beneath the many split layers, great time and precision to extract the telling debris.
I worked to carve out the dirt, to rid my hands of the everyday work mess that drives my
soul and gossips my menial livelihood.
And I wish I could say that there was a dramatic culmination to my
metaphorical dream. But I can’t. There wasn’t.
I opened my eyes to see the plain old brown-grey dark
that has been my life since the birth of my last child, the blindness that has coated my
every movement, every thought, every intention
since before I could awaken to color and breathe.
Most days, I do not roll over. I don’t attempt to recapture the lost.
I trust my doctors to
Life, Preciously Poured
Kate Benham
You pour a cup of pecans
Like a kid catching raindrops
In a bucket.
Careful not to spill,
Your fingers playing tremolo on a
Violin-string cup measure.
Your bed-tucked
Mouth, warm, with
Tongue searching the lips
For forgotten first lines of bedtime stories
Like misplaced glasses, resting on your head.
I read to you, now,
In hospital beds.
Forehead wrinkles stacked
In three creases–
Your crossword face,
Mouth-chewed pencil between your lips,
Scooping for synonyms
As you now scoop sugar.
Patient tablespoons of vanilla
Heaped with the effort
Of standing up for fifteen minutes
Love spelled in spilled flour
By hairless eyelid blinks.
This mother’s day coffee cake
Streuseled with memories of able-bodied bike rides
Suspended in white hospital gauze.
It tastes like antiseptic and cinnamon.
This baking is labor
For the hands of a heart surgeon
Too tremored to hold a scalpel,
Hold a measuring cup,
Hold on.
His life
Preciously poured,
Savored in my mouth
Even as it slides down
My throat–
Swallowed.
About the poet:
Kate Benham graduated from Stanford in 2009 with a degree in feminist studies. She is currently working for a women’s health nonprofit in India and applying to medical school. She
Chirality
Stacy Nigliazzo
I see myself, always
through a stark looking glass
the fun house view of my own face
reflected in the eyes of my patients–
tangled in the bleeding strands
that line the gray sclera of the meth addict
drowning in the pooling ink that splits
the swelling pupil of the hemorrhagic stroke
swimming in the antibiotic slather
that blurs the newborn’s first gaze–
my clouded countenance,
ever present–
slipping even through parched flesh
along the steely glide of the angiocath
glistening in the fluid bag
of intravenous medication
glaring back
from the sliding metal siderail–
twelve hours streaming from my skin
like an open wound in the scrub sink
face to face
in the soap-splattered mirror–
only then,
do I look away.
About the poet:
Stacy Nigliazzo is an ER nurse and a lifelong poet. Her work has been featured in Pulse–voices from the heart of medicine, Creative Nursing, American Journal of Nursing, Blood and Thunder and The International Journal of Healthcare & Humanities. She is a graduate of Texas A&M University and is a 2006 recipient of the Elsevier Award for Nursing Excellence.
About the word:
Chirality refers to the quality of some objects that cannot be superimposed
Dissolution
Jocelyn Jiao
the articles went first.
then the pronouns, the verbs,
nouns. they melted away, leaving
only memories of warmth
cradled by salivary glands.
adjectives flutter behind
my front teeth, ready for flight.
only adverbs remain,
curled beneath my tongue–
yawning, drowsy:
the softest words of vocabulary.
the lilt of my voice has left too,
soapy Californian vowels
scrubbed clean.
when i speak to my mother,
she complains of my consonants,
how they have begun
to iron out cadences, climb
over inflections, ride
them into deep sand. she says
only my whisper remains whole.
but not for long;
already the throat whistles.
it all started at your
bedside, when your lips
were parted, straining
to form one first, final word.
a sudden embrace of cold
concrete made you into
some bright thing with eyes
translucent, gasping
for the comfort of
water, empty and clear–
when ebullience
once spilled from your lips
as a sun warms an earth.
do you see? words are meant
for creatures of air. i have no use for them;
even fish can sing.
gently, carefully, tenderly,
night arrives; it pivots and
provides no answer. i feel your name
coil in my mouth, watch
as it ebbs
Third Party
Mary E. Moore
Tipping forward to escape
the wheelchair’s confines, the ancient one
pleads with her feet, “Go home.”
It’s her companion who volunteers
the Chief Complaint: “Ever since her stroke,
Mother’s back seems to hurt.
Her doctors say there’s nothing can be done,
but I thought that perhaps a specialist ….”
She strokes the old woman’s shoulders.
“Does it hurt here, or there, or if I touch this?”
My fingers probe among birdish bones.
Ignoring me, the patient whimpers, “Home.”
When the daughter’s eyes register pain, I say,
“I’ll inject this spot near her sacroiliac joint.
It may provide relief, in any case do no harm.”
I fill in the charge sheet attached to the chart.
Low back pain. Trigger point injection.
Return PRN. But how should this be billed?
With the old woman’s medical insurance?
With the daughter’s?
Or should I pay for this one?
_______________
Editor’s Note: PRN is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase pro re nata, which in English means “as needed.”
About the poet:
Mary E. Moore earned a PhD as an experimental psychologist, but after working in a hospital, she decided to study for an MD. She became a rheumatologist, ultimately heading the division of rheumatology at Albert Einstein
Sleep Hygiene
Daniel Becker
Outline the night and all its objects
in black magic marker.
The world through closed eyes
needs texture
the way tires need tread,
brains need wrinkles, and hypnosis
needs the power of suggestion–
traction, surface area, and control
might also apply to a cat
buried alive underneath the sheets;
if so, don’t forget the one on top.
Stay up for several nights before
the night you plan to sleep.
Oil the ceiling fan.
True or false: the bladder
is on a separate circuit?
Don’t eat in bed, especially chips.
Snoring + sleep apnea + restless legs
+ hemorrhoids + lumbago =
the human condition. The winter itch
as well would be unfair.
Use pillows to solve or suppress all of the above,
a pillow shaped like the horizon
or the supine profile of your partner, or even better
a partner who won’t mind being used as a pillow–
together you become the mountains and their clouds,
between the two of you a hidden canyon,
lost in your slopes there are deep limestone caves,
hot springs, the occasional tremor
of tectonic plates and knees.
About the poet:
Daniel Becker practices and teaches general internal medicine (an endangered specialty) at
Grandmother
Elizabeth Kao
Today, her head is spinning, just like yesterday,
And the day before that. She is dizzy, experiencing
pain we can’t know unless our heads have hurt like
she hurts now. All she wants is to lie down, and
when we tell her she just woke up, she says she
can’t sleep, because we don’t understand that
she’s not concerned with the sleeping. She’s the
same with food, telling us everything tastes bad,
merely eating to keep from being hungry.
She felt nothing to be worth doing after the fence fell,
just another part of a neglected house, but not
so neglected as to scream injustice to the world.
No one would mind that she did nothing, nor
would she–or more accurately, she didn’t care.
So she turned inward, after seventy-three years of
War, raising a daughter and two sons, watching the
grandchildren for them, then left alone because
she seemed strong, for their convenience.
Tomorrow she will get up, eat breakfast, and sit
in her chair. By the afternoon, she will lie down in
her bed again, staring into space, wishing the pain
but not-pain will go away. And we blame a
chemical imbalance and wonder whether we
The Disabled Boat
Steve Gunther-Murphy
Drifting on the sea of disease
in a cardboard boat,
never knowing when the slash
of a spinal eel
will lunge from its coral-bone cave
and cut through
the threads
of a once dancing ankle
or the push of a thigh
singing race or run.
Waiting without wanting–
as the slap of a wave
against the paper-thin stern
then bow
brings on the storm
that pummels every movement
until you slip into a coma of the wind;
your sails ripped from the mainstay
and the tar between the rails
yelling like the death of a two-year-old child.
You wake weeks
later
and notice
that your keel is gone;
your body shakes like a rock cod against
the pith of the boat’s floor
with the hook deep in your gill;
making you talk in slow motion
and without air.
Who wants to live this life
of a shadow fish,
pulled from the depths of who you were
and gutted of simple motions
or the ability to sing glee from your gullet?
This is not the space I am.
This is not the blue
Triptych for John
Yun Lan
Part I: The first time I saw you
I met John
without
John,
without introduction.
Cold,
cold,
cold hand.
Part II: Cadaver as Decapod
John was surely a hermit crab, having four small limbs to anchor the body and six long
limbs to advance it. He gathered sea anemones on his back, and weeds in his spiny beard. He bore
stellate scars, the digitated marks of five pointed teeth. There was a constellation of them, surely
from the care of blue spined urchins. The urchins couldn’t make him stay. Did they evict him or
had he just outgrown his home?
Surely, his soft belly was turned out to the brine, the ocean full of predators. In each eye of
many lenses, what did he see? Was he afraid to scuttle from this white ribbed shell to the larger?
Perhaps not. He trusted he could replace his old limbs. He could carry anemones to protect him.
He would fear neither octopus, nor fellow crabs, nor stars.
We can pick at the questions, we each with ten limbs: sharp scissors, blunt scissors, olive
point probe, teasing wooden handled straight needle, thumb forceps, “fitted teeth” tissue forceps
with 1×2 jaws,