Conduction
When people next to you begin to swipe left and right on bodies on their phones, the black glass like polished fulgurite, don’t feel like you have to feel left out just because you’re aro/ace. Join in their looking at the faces and chests, even if they have to tell you what makes someone attractive....
Last Words
The dictionary, red and tattered, sits in a cardboard box in my garage along with a telephone, its only button programmed to speed-dial my mobile number. Both items once belonged to my mother. For a time, the dictionary and its 1,550 pages of definitions comforted her. A woman of words, my mother wrote the food...
Hollywood
I call my mother to tell her I’m dying. I am laying on my back on the dirty off-white carpet of my apartment in Maryland, having another panic attack. Of course, I am not dying. I feel outside my body, as if I’m looking down on myself telling her my goodbyes. I want my sister...
A Cleaving
My mother, my mother’s mother, and her mother, and her mother, and her mother’s mother—their worries, fears, traumas, triumphs—all live here in the bowels of my bowels. Tucked in right next to my womb, curled like a sleeping retriever. The pulsing and pushing and swirling of want and need wrapped in tight like a lowercase...
10.23.15
You want to—or at least feel you should try to—make some meaning out of that night, the night you jumped off the roof. Everything went black, you weren’t expecting that to lift, but it did and you find yourself in ICU three days later, intubated; every limb and appendage in your body broken; a smashed...
Sick and Well Time
I have to write down somewhere how I feel on the days when I don’t move and I don’t stay still. When my legs slide over the bed-edge and I’m walking to the bathroom, putting toothpaste on the brush, tasting mint on my tongue—and still part of me is back in the bed, folding and...
Experiences of Disability: Our Guest Editors in Conversation
Sarah Fawn Montgomery: Editing this Brevity special issue, Experiences of Disability, has been an interesting process that reminds us of the power of language and the privilege of publishing. Can you both talk about why you initially wanted to edit this special issue, as well as the ways the emergence of COVID-19 and our current...
Your Personal Prescription Information
Patient: Sue William Silverman Medication: Heart Infusion Common Uses: Morbus Cordis. To discourage love with married, inappropriate men. Quantity: Daily Directions: Swallow first thing in morning before you have second thoughts. Before you have ANY thoughts. Patient Allergies: Single Available Men Ingredient Name: cor meum infusionem Before Using this Medicine: Be sure you are currently...
Three Angels
I. The first angel arrives dressed in yellow. I can’t stop looking at her face. She rises from the sidewalk at the crest of Sacramento and Buchanan grinning, mouth cracked open, upturned to the sky. She’s around my age, it looks like, which means she is more old than young. Not old enough, however. Never...
Dear Editor, Who Made the Remarks About Not Wanting Walmart Poems
The first thing I thought of was writing an Ode to an LOL, these little dolls that come in ovals that you open to find a different one (surprise!) that my six-year-old daughter is obsessed with and that my wife sneaks off to Walmart to find in the check-out line and bring them home and...
Louder, Louder
Days after my doctor finds a lump on my thyroid, the size of an M&M (peanut he specifies, not plain) a student asks me what the nineties were like. For the nation? For you, says my student. She is thirteen. Louder, louder, we say to her when she reads her poems because she barely...
Sunrise
Try not to think about the dog, Jack, the ten-pound mutt that won’t sit still in the back. He’s nervous, jitterbugging from window to window. Feels like trip to the vet. He pauses to bother with a flea. First teeth. Then raking with a hind leg. Then bounding over the gear shifter to check out...
Senior Moments
Heavy double doors slowly swing open. A tall old man in a hospital johnny, stooped and gnarled, wanders the long hallway. My mother, half his height, pastel scrubs and permed hair, pulls me past him. “Sit in the day room with the residents. I’ve got to get to work.” Where my mother works, I follow....
Hoot
1. She titled it “Autumn Beauty.” Three crimson maple leaves hang from slender, silvery branches, backgrounded by a watery swirl of teal, lime, burnt umber, and gold. A quiet peacefulness balances the bold beauty of the leaves. The painting was her favorite, and she brought it “just to show” when she and my dad came...
Review of Kelly Davio’s It’s Just Nerves: Notes on a Disability
As many essayists and memoirists know, poets often stroll into nonfiction and bowl a perfect strike, knocking us all over like so many bowling pins. Kelly Davio’s skill as a poet is in full effect in the pages of her new essay collection, It’s Just Nerves: Notes on a Disability. She’s underselling with that word...
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