Visiting Nurse, Come Spring
JC Alfier
She keeps to her small anonymity,
the secret winter of herself.
Her clients seek a better future.
But the future just looks away.
She’ll offer quiet answers
to the darkest questions,
redefine their plight till even pain
sounds magical, knowing eyes alone
speak the language of the body.
Her oldest client is the voice
of an old believer — its sinew of scorn,
fearful, her eyes burning beautiful.
A few are driven to clinics
where mendicants salute each other
with opioids — the brand names
exotic as medieval saints.
When the woman speaks,
her late father drifts through her mind
like a ghost ship
she can’t rub from her eyes.
After the workdays shut, down
she brushes spring’s early butterflies
from her windshield,
carries the spectral wings
home to her daughter
who puts them on her bedside table.
They catch the white spark of the moon.
JC Alfier’s (they/them) most recent book of poetry, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, River Styx, Southern Poetry Review and Vassar Review. They are also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work after the style of Toshiko Okanoue, Francesca Woodman, and especially Katrien De Blauwer.
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Post-Op
Genevieve Betts
In my post-op appointment, my surgeon
says the tumor was huge, that he removed it
and all kinds of other nasty junk too
and I can’t help but imagine him wielding
his scalpel behind my ear, folding and taping
it down, reaching into the canal to pull out
a beat up El Camino, light blue like my dad’s,
a hole rusted out where feet should go,
the real possibility of “driving” like the Flintstones,
an avocado green fridge from the 60s,
door twisted open, odors of tuna and vinegar
wafting out like a cartoon stink cloud,
an old drum kit, some of the purple paint
still glittering through the filth, snare drum
bent like a plastic plate warped in the microwave,
not unlike my left eardrum now, though it still
attempts to cup sound in the tympanic membrane,
pass it along to the music-making mallet.
Genevieve Betts is the author of the poetry collections A New Kind of Tongue (FlowerSong Press, 2023) and An Unwalled City (Prolific Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in Sleet Magazine, Hotel Amerika, The Tishman Review, The Literary Review, Cloudbank, Sky Island Journal, and in other journals and anthologies. She is an assistant professor at Santa Fe Community College and teaches for Arcadia University’s low-residency MFA program in Glenside, PA.
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I woke up this morning feeling
Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
I woke up this morning feeling
which is a start I suppose
like a taxidermy job gone wrong
a raccoon or fox for example
whose stuffing has turned to dust
and settled in all the wrong places
and is missing one or maybe both
of its glass eyes or maybe like
one of those Greek monstrosities
that are part this and part that but
a really really badly put together one
is my point nothing impressive
except maybe the fact that I got up
and also got dressed and even typed how
I woke up this morning feeling
which is a start I suppose
Nathaniel Lachenmeyer is an award-winning disabled author of books for children and adults. His first book, The Outsider, which takes as its subject his late father’s struggles with schizophrenia and homelessness, was published by Broadway Books. Nathaniel has forthcoming/recently published poems, stories and essays with Potomac Review, Epiphany, Permafrost, Berkeley Poetry Review, About Place Journal, Breakwater Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Full Bleed, and DIAGRAM. Nathaniel lives outside Atlanta with his family. http://www.NathanielLachenmeyer.com.
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Miscarriage
Lynn Pedersen
Nothing to do but return
to the apartment, cross the green
threshold, wedding gifts barely
three months out of their wrappings.
It was the plates that angered me most,
round like ova, fragile,
bleached like bones. I longed to take
each onto the small side porch,
smash it to atoms with a hammer—
one blow to the center—
repeat until I was squatting in a beach
of porcelain ground to a fine sand,
my knees bleeding.
Who’s to say all sand isn’t born
of grief?
If I whittle myself down
to marrow, nucleus, mitochondria—
What’s the right word
for the smallest pocket of self?
Soul? Essence? Seed
you grieve in your hand?
Lynn Pedersen’s poems have appeared in New England Review, Ecotone, Nimrod, Borderlands, and The Southern Poetry Review. She is the author of The Nomenclature of Small Things (Carnegie Mellon) and two chapbooks. A graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, she lives in Atlanta, Georgia. www.lynnpedersen.com
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Exploratory Surgery
Bill Richard
Surgeon, be the poet for my body.
Pull aside the gown
expose the abdomen
shave the hair
incise the skin’s surface
cut through dermis
slice muscle
slit the fascia.
Behold the organs.
May they be arrayed like a sonnet,
familiar and fresh.
But if the rhythm is sprung
the meter askew
edit with your scalpel.
Restore the familiar.
Make my body sing.
Bill Richard is a standardized patient at the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix, and other medical schools. His partner, Kent Carpenter, is an infectious disease specialist at Banner University Medical Center, Phoenix. Bill’s poems have been published in such publications as Red River Review, Illya’s Honey, and National Catholic Reporter.
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Coming to Terms with Chronic Illness: Nerves
Tarn Wilson
She is left with flawed nerves.
Raw and frayed, they are made
of cheap and ragged velvet.
A broken zipper. A leaky garden hose
too stiff to coil. In her stream,
a broken shopping cart tips
sideways. Holiness is hard to see.
Her fire alarm cannot be fixed.
Bee hives live in her ears.
Holiness is hard to hear.
The pears are bruised
and past their prime.
Fingernails break
below the quick. The symbol
blinks: low air in the tires.
So much is tender now: her ribs,
her lips.
She rests now in the middle
of the day. Holiness is hard to feel.
She rouses herself from the couch,
climbs the stairs, and drags her sweaty
blanket to her bed. Her thoughts
are stuck in endless loops.
Her feelings are so easily hurt.
Her icy feet wake her in the night.
Holiness is hard to think.
She wishes she could celebrate
bones instead, how beautiful
they are when sun-bleached,
the echo-clack they make when tapped
together. Their spare and quiet dignity.
Their uprightness and their strength.
The poets have stolen all the bones.
Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm, the memoir-in-essays In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award), and a popular craft book: 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts: 501 Prompts to Unleash Your Creativity and Inspire You to Write. Her essays, poetry, and book reviews have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Assay, Brevity, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, River Teeth, Ruminate, Sweet Lit, and The Sun. She earned her MA in education from Stanford and an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop and is an educator in the San Francisco Bay Area.