'Flash' writing anthology about chronic pain - submissions welcome!
by Miranda Cichy The year I grew tomatoes I had no understanding that my body was failing, how the plants needed more earth than I could give them, out in the yard on a concrete bed, hunkered in pots the size of my skull. I fed them too early, I forgot to […]
D is for Dysesthesia It’s also for dictionary. I’m very fond of mine. I was given it as a gift in 1993. Emblazoned on the front are the following statements: • The foremost dictionary of current English: now thoroughly revised and expanded • 120,000 entries and 190,000 definitions • Over 20,000 […]
The difference between lowercase-p, pain, and uppercase-P, Pain, is huge. Bigger than just a shift-key should make it. The difference between “Yeah, let’s go on a hike today!” and “I can’t walk today.” The difference between pain that ends, and Pain that just backs off for a while. The difference between the morning pills and the afternoon […]
It wouldn’t be fair to say the ache starts every morning as I wake. Or truthfully that I wake at all, more I become conscious… of the pain. The fire started small and young. Fickle flickering up my spine. Across my shoulders like a seasoned log, spreading further, faster as I age. It took hold. […]
When he was dying, I swallowed a CoCodamol before bedtime as if it were hot chocolate. I craftily attributed my zen-like calm in the face of helping Dad as he pissed blood into a plastic pot at 3am – I don’t know what’s happening to me, he said, again and again – to my sensible […]
M.E. destroys one life and ruins more. Fatigue replaces rage. Accept it. by Linda Cosgriff Author website United Kingdom
If pleasure is the absence of pain, then pain comes first. In the planter outside my front door, a wren’s nest whorls down to darkness. The nestlings chirr when I pass by, or when the wind’s fingers brush too close, as if the wind and I are mothers, returning with meat, as if refreshed sensation […]
generate stay slow seal here by Sean Medium Belgium
I lie on the couch, but you cannot see my velocity. I have a tangential vectoring sense that pain is coiled mitochondrial speed, that while I am prone I am riding the rails deep into the future and the past at once, as if pain exposes ruptures in the time/space continuum and pulls me into […]
An afternoon spent, or was it an evening, or three, in a wheel clamp’s tender clasp. My dues for modernist mutation paid out in full: ribs, calves, hands, sections of skull, wrenching, arching, hardening. A homecoming of sorts, a holding; mattress won’t grumble, neither will I – if only we knew if we’re hot or […]