When I was ten, and my sister, Eunice, was eleven, we made a suicide pact. With a rusty hacksaw we snitched from my father’s workbench; we huddled on the wooden…
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Image Credit: Dev Murphy My mother called me last week to tell me she had dreamed of her sister Christy’s trip to the hospital before it happened. Minor illness.…
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A third eye for sensing danger has planted itself at the base of my skull. It sends out a dull throb when the possibility of bodily harm is perceived. It’s…
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Image Credit: Bailey Pennington In that very moment—hearing the doctor strip his hands free of the latex gloves he had just used in the examination room—my worst nightmare was…
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* * * Come sit and empty your pockets, child, and let us count what we’ve got. We can sort it this way: for me, love counts. And cancer counts.…
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Creative Nonfiction / EssayReviewAlive and Writing: What Recent Memoirs Reveal about Illness and the State of Health Care
Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich Twelve Books, 2018 256 pages / Twelve Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved by Kate Bowler Random House, 2018 208 pages…
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Image Credit: Edwin Carmona “Every dictatorship, whether of man or party, leads to the two forms that schizophrenia loves most: the monologue and the mausoleum.” —Octavio Paz Joe…
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Image Credit: Shuttershock Mama died at home on a Sunday morning. During the cancer, our rambling two-story brick and wood home in the hills of Topanga, a rustic canyon outside…
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(Originally published in Harpur Palate issue 15.2, February 2016) The doctor wore a navy blazer, his outfit for giving out bad news, which he scheduled for Fridays. Good news, would there…
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disarmament farewell’s occasion composes two flushed and open-mouthed against one very still for an elsewhere dream unfolds in the right eye as the left transmits to the machine proprioceptive…
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Selected Emptiness* A cat grabbed a fledgling by the feet. A storm shook a fledgling from a tree. The sky caught a fledgling as it fell. A snake bit…