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

Tag: economic

‘The Grinder’, by Alan Horne

We pay the cable from the reel in staggers, 
jerk the squiggly line between the bushes,
wake the minor aches, the none too vicious 
graters in the knee that love to grab us.

Nothing lightweight in the gear for this one:
the Black and Decker like a struggling toddler; 
the squeaky derricks of our legs manoeuvred
round the pain to give the tools a platform.

Though it’s money saved; and while the gripe’s curtailed 
we crouch to proud, redundant, bent old nails 
which squeal against the grinder, scattering in the nettles 
tiny marigolds of blistered metal 
until the shanks resign, the flat heads flying. 
But how to rise, from those smoking stumps of iron?

 

  • by Alan Horne

United Kingdom

twitter @mralanhorne

‘The Cost of Falling Ill’, by Linda Cosgriff

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

‘Focal Signal Intensity Enhancements’, by Maureen Miller

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

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.