Tag: fear (Page 2 of 2)

‘Swans and Swallows’, by Mary Marie Dixon

February 23, 2018 / Sara Wasson

(After Tennyson’s ‘The Dying Swan’)

In this wasting plain a
Wedge of swans
Tangle in water
So deep her eyes
In the gyring ferment

I am impotent
Warming blankets only burn
The stab

I cannot touch her
I cannot reach her
To this berth I cannot go
She writhes

White feathers
Drop around her bed
Swans wedge her in again
Swimming violently
Their bowing heads
Surface again

This churning of webbed feet
In water I cannot enter nor fathom
There is no present no past no future
Only some existence that is now and not now

She would wish to die
I would wish to die

Explicitly she does not wish to die
The room is swirling with the rotation of swans
Specters with no beauty
Shape-shifters leading to another world
No end no beginning

Still outside we hear
In thunder birds
A swirling of swallows

by Mary Marie Dixon

United States

‘On Scarborough beach, I played football’, by Paul Allender

February 23, 2018 / Sara Wasson

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.

by Paul Allender, @pauliepaul55 at instagram

U.K.

‘Focal Signal Intensity Enhancements’, by Maureen Miller

February 11, 2018 / Sara Wasson

I’m poeming this poem
from a forest-boreal
transition zone

anticipating intense
public reaction
to my poem

against the bony mets
that XXXX up my posture
& infiltrate our nat’l backbone

its prostate biopsy
analogy lost/inapparent
in the sagamore gloam

this spine unresponsive
to the pre-patent analog
that is my poem

by Maureen Miller
doctorwritermaureenmiller.tumblr.com

[This poem was inspired by an ad for a medical conference, “Summer Radiology Symposium at the Sagamore,” at an upstate New York retreat for Gilded Age millionaires. I found out about it while previewing prostate biopsies for a surgical pathology service. We don’t see the pain except in tissue core numbers. Who that’s most unfair to is the subject. Readers may decide.]

‘Food for Thought’, by Ryan Michael Dumas

February 8, 2018 / Sara Wasson

Just got a letter from disability insurance: Denied. I’m not disabled enough to get anything. After months of trying to convince them.

How do you prove you can’t work?

I cannot sit up, stand, or walk hardly at all. There is no job I can do while laying down, without having to make phone calls.

Just laying here, my back aches. But it’s the most comfortable position I can find. (It hurts my hips but those aren’t important.)

If I dared to sit up, my lower and upper back would scream in agony. It would not end until I laid back down.

I couldn’t keep working; had to move back in with my toxic parents. I have no money, no freedom, and no chance. I have no future. And that terrifies me.

I’m a survivor. The world wants me dead. It’s only a matter of time.

by Ryan Michael Dumas

My tumblr

‘Tinnitus’, by Declan Lloyd

February 4, 2018 / Sara Wasson

by Declan Lloyd

U.K.