Derrick Z. Jackson: Ethylene Oxide Adds to Toxic Burden for Memphis Residents
Children are particularly sensitive to ethylene oxide exposure as it can damage their DNA.
Jeffrey Harrison: Disconcerting
The word became the mantra of
her last few years, which were, in fact,
often disconcerting: her descent
into dementia, her cancer diagnosis,
her fall, her fractured hip.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: This Worn-Out Hospital Gown
like all the other women survivors,
me, walking free from the monster.
T. R. Hummer: My Wife in Chemo
The house of healing is crystalline, clean
as the diagram of a carbon molecule drawn
With a laser beam on one facet of a diamond.
Sydney Lea: Heterodox
A knows of B
That after grim chemo his hair came back
The doctors reckoned they’d licked his disease
Thomas A. Thomas: In a Time
It is the month of our first walk along the salt
shore together, and of my beloved’s first illness,
harbinger of worse to come, month of our lost
mortgage, of bankruptcy, August of learning
Leslie Anne Mcilroy: Call Back
The pink half-gown is tied wrong.
I can’t figure out the strings.
My nipples are hard in the
fluorescent waiting room.
Tayve Neese: Inside her muscle, a blossom,
This is what the tumor had done,
reduced the whole world to nothing
but metaphor
Ellery Akers: Rachel Carson
I think of the way she knew
that eels slid from brook to brook
and then to the sea.
Louie Skipper: The Beginning
I keep trying to persuade my father
into a better opinion of me now that he is dead.
Adrie Kusserow: A Brief Respite after Chemo
A BRIEF RESPITE FROM THE USUAL PERCEPTUAL DIVIDES: AFTER CHEMO I SKI THROUGH THE VERMONT WOODS IN ANOTHER CLIMATE CHANGE STORM
Sharon Fagan McDermott: The Book of Lesser Angers
presses each broken thing like an autumn leaf between pages where I watch the pace of disintegration, lacy residue. Rain writes within it a sloppy welter—the neighbor shaking her … Continue reading
Molly Fisk: Cancer, again
this time a slow- growing rarity tracing delicate tendrils through kidney and liver, the lung’s sturdy wall, artery somewhere I can’t remember, though twice I’ve been told. How the mind … Continue reading
Vox Populi 