Translating Chronic Pain: Moments and Fragments

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

Author: Sara Wasson (Page 9 of 11)

‘Twenty Minutes’ (Anon.)

February 24, 2018 /
Twenty minutes; one thousand two hundred seconds, nothing really, unless you’re waiting, waiting to be told about something you may not want to hear. I feel different; my body is telling me there is a problem. Seventeen have passed. I’m sitting in a room where time has stood still. I’m surrounded by a sea of unknown faces, all waiting with me. Some are biting their lips; others stare into space like I am. There are only two outcomes, positive, or negative. Polar opposites. “Steven? Come on through.” I follow with my heart in my mouth. “Take a seat.” I do as I’m told. She is smiling at me. But it’s not giving me any comfort. She begins talking, but her words disappear into white noise. My heart has left my mouth and disappeared into the pit of my stomach. I have the answer. Now all I have are questions.

 

 

  • anonymous author

England

‘Swans and Swallows’, by Mary Marie Dixon

February 23, 2018 /

(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

‘Hurting Haikus’, by Vanessa

February 22, 2018 /

A photograph taken by someone seated at the top of a small hill, showing their legs at rest.

 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.


 

  • by Vanessa

[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

‘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.

‘And for a long time’, by Amy Allara

February 18, 2018 /

Small branch with wire.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.

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