Translating Chronic Pain: Moments and Fragments

'Flash' writing anthology about chronic pain - submissions welcome!

Tag: witness (Page 2 of 2)

‘The Cost of Falling Ill’, by Linda Cosgriff

March 29, 2018 /

Work as hard as you can
for as long as you can

Then you’re ill
can’t work
can’t walk
can’t bear talk
or remember how no pain felt
can count on the hand you can’t lift
your friends
and family

can’t work
or provide
can’t afford pride
or holidays
you manage Christmas, on plastic
can’t walk your children to school
it’s uphill

you’re ill
can’t work
can’t live
can’t provide –
the part that was you
the man that was you
the pride in you
died

Try not to care 
that the love of your life 
is no longer your wife 
but your carer

Work as hard as you can
for as long as you can

  • by Linda Cosgriff

Author website

United Kingdom

‘The Velocity of Pain’, by Sonya Huber

March 11, 2018 /

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 the openings, as if a body at rest in pain is a body in motion through time rather than space. There is a sense of pressure on my skin as the force of time’s ungluing. There is a sense of coiled mathematical work and a formula connecting time to pain through space as I leave my location on the timeline and descend into time’s scaffolding. I am quantum, visible in two places at once. The electrons vibrate with pain, which is the pressure of the universe, the music of the planets.


United States

‘Mutation’, by Marion Michell

March 2, 2018 /

This image is of a small green vase, grass-green and made of thick glass which slightly tapers top to bottom. Four small tulips stand in water, three with fading orange petals, one with purple. All are in the stage just before the petals, which seem to be curling in on themselves, fall off. A few stamen are visible, like tiny black tongues.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 cold, horsehair or hardware, flesh or fish or foil.


U.K.

‘Chime’, by Marion Michell

February 21, 2018 /

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!

This image is a collage of two black and white photographs of a hand. The top half shows palm and slightly bent fingers horizontally, the bottom half vertically. The original was photographed in extreme light against white background, in order to achieve pronounced shadows. The latter appear more curved than the fingers themselves.

 

  • by Marion Michell

Blog and book: Sublimely Supinely

U.K.

‘Hagalaz’, by Ruth V. Chalkley

February 18, 2018 /

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.

‘Focal Signal Intensity Enhancements’, by Maureen Miller

February 11, 2018 /

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.]

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