'Flash' writing anthology about chronic pain - submissions welcome!
On Scarborough beach, I played football.
This image is one of my new paintings. It is autobiographical and consists of two halves. One half reflects my early life growing up in Neepsend, an industrial area of Sheffield. The other half depicts me, as a child, on the beach with my football.
U.K.
Eight months of pain, guilt.
Losing my movement slowly,
Affecting my work.Pain in my hip, back,
Encroaching on everything.
Physio: please help.Boss can’t understand,
Pretended it wasn’t bad.
I used to be fit.
Practicing patience,
Trying to be kind to self.
But some days that’s hard.
[This image shows my legs in better times, when they were still able to take me on a 15 kilometre hike through the Rocky Mountains. Summer, 2017.]
Canada
Lie in the car, stiff as a bell’s tongue, and just as mute. Pain in aspiration stage – still hoping I’ll hurl myself against walls, eager to chime.
After a blurry episode give looking another go. Burgess Park is not itself right now: tiny, lifeless, the green of grass and foliage moulded in the same garish tones. Clouds, birds, a plastic sun, tacked on a smudge of blue. We too minuscule and stuck mid-move in a scale-model some architect should have improved.
Bed, at long last. Limbs scattered like mikado sticks; palms so painful they seem large as cities. Must have crashed across the continent, one hand throbbing in Reykjavik, the other limp in the Aegean Sea. Each crumple in my sheet a mountain ridge or carved out canyon, nuzzling the gash of me. A chore to breathe.
Days shivering in sleety weather zones. I pine for hot. PEMalaise me not!
Blog and book: Sublimely Supinely
U.K.
U. K.
In Lithuanian, runoti means both “to cut (with a knife)” and “to speak”.
Hail: Hagalaz
Pain, loss, suffering, hardship, sickness, crisis.
Spirit-breaker
Faith-Taker
Misery-Maker
Joy-Stealer
Dream-Breaker
Shadow-Hound.
Thought-Waker
Friend-Fooler
Life-Dealer
Mood-Carver
Time-Stealer
Life-Hider.
Sometimes, some time,
Signal-Saver.
U.K.
And for a long time
She wanted to tell it to someone
place it in the visible world—
yet nothing she could speak of
nor anything she had been told.
In our residences,
the old-fashioned exile
of unwelcome subjects
to guard against
the wrong arrangement of text.
How to narrate an illness
in fairer climates and
to fair-weather figures.
*
How not to.
U.S.
Today I was issued with hand splints.
Carapaced; oddly reassuring, oddly restricting;
Even in their disposition.
I am that crab.
Their bindings have an onomatopoeia: irascible.
by Ruth Victoria Chalkley
Additional poems hosted on other websites: Tanzkarte NHS; Carrier Pigeon for Science
U.K.
i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom i want my mom
(after a poem by Jane Kenyon)
The sick mother stayed in the car
During swimming, music, dance.
Not yet fifty,
She had learned the many ways
The able-bodied become just bodies.
Afternoon always came too quick
With its carpools and constant motion.
She was still the secretary
Of details and schedules.
Still indispensable.
So in between finding the lost
Shoes or suits or permission slips
And driving– always driving–
She tilted her seat back, tucked
A swim towel or bag beneath her head
And let the pain pill sweep her into freedom.
Free from the other mothers, lips pursed,
Pulling their children away from hollow eyes.
Free from the fathers, eyebrows raised,
Lingering to admire gaunt cheekbones.
Fever-flushed under windshield glass
She is free to dream a storybook self,
And a kiss to break the curse
Of endless doctors, tests, and drugs.
A fairy tale of never being sick again.
– by Amy Wray Irish
To read more see Creation Stories, a book of poetry and art by Amy Wray Irish
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