Tag: time (Page 3 of 3)

‘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.]

‘Outside In’, by Kendra Preston Leonard

February 11, 2018 / Sara Wasson

The snow and salt on your coat
suggests that you’ve been outside
shoveling, maybe, or
tossing snowballs for the dogs.

But in fact it’s the dogs who have
brought the snow and salt inside,
flinging it onto your coat
when they shake it away.

Your coat hangs on the back of a chair
and you haven’t been out all day.
You’ve been mostly in bed because of the
new and unfamiliar but not
unexpected pain in your hip,
Another joint your illness
is colonizing in your body.

You can only watch the dogs
play in the snow,
young pups again,
their own bodies slowing even faster than yours.

Black dogs,
white snow,
white snow,
red counterpane,
the outside in
where you can
be in it.

by Kendra Preston Leonard
Author website

‘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

‘Ray’, by Philip Brennan

February 6, 2018 / Sara Wasson

His hand closed up over the stretch of five years, and stayed like that till he passed. First the pinkie, as if winched towards the palm by an invisible string, and then the ring finger went, till his hand was frozen stiff like a claw. It was like it had slowly snapped shut, sixty years late for the butterflies we’d chased in Parson’s field. It was no worry to him, he chuckled, his pipe still fit between his fingers.

by Philip Brennan