Maren Klemp
And suddenly I realized, this is how it is for her. In her eyes, she is always under attack, she always has to fight, and if there isn’t anything to attack she must create it. Maybe she can’t feel strong on her own, there must always be an oppressor, she is the underdog, the caboose.
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Jeremy Thomas
Or I’ll call you scleroses. I won’t say my brain
is melting, my brain is dissolving. The Temporarily Able
-Bodied don’t like metaphorical bodies. Only sick & not-sick.
Noukka Signe
Listening to my social work colleagues talk about clients: "She is nuts," "She is crazy," "Psycho!"
Shhhhh, stay silent. I have a secret.
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Frida Kahlo
an hour of closed eyes ignoring
pseudo hockey mask and tight
quarters of a human shaped
tube like a plastic coffin;
I go by Meredith K Ultra or Ink and Daggers. That's Ink and Daggers, not Ink and Free Cinnamon Rolls. I think of my art as high tech digital finger painting collage cartoons. My work relies heavily on reference material and are drawn on my iPad (mostly in the Procreate app) with my finger. I stopped using a stylus because my toddler liked to chew on them, and I prefer having to rely on as little equipment as possible to make my art.
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Sammie Saxon
In May, I scribble out one to my mother. I start to hoard the pills, they line the paper, weak soldiers eager to drown. I imagine she won’t understand, like a paper doll, blank look, easy to fold.
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Kristen (KML Creatives)
People who have a disability or suffer from a mental illness or a physical condition are frustrated. There is social bias that in order for you to be sick you have to look the part or for you to be disabled you have to be in a wheelchair. Meanwhile most illnesses can’t be seen with the naked eye, but the symptoms are real and excruciating for the sufferers. And disabilities can be nuanced and unnoticeable too. So lack of education, awareness, and understanding creates and cultivates a society and immediate milieu with selective compassion and intolerance. On top of that, others who have no idea what it is like living with a disability or a chronic condition like to speak for us and our experiences. It’s not the place of able-bodied and healthy people to steal our voices. We just want to be able to express what we go through in a safe outlet and to close the gap of being misunderstood, underestimated, and devalued. Hopefully with more people speaking up and sharing their stories we can achieve better understanding in our society and in our homes.
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Christo Dagorov
Besides, my new roommate terrifies me. She is prowling throughout the small bedroom like a caged tiger, snarling at the hospital staff and taunting them. I’m convinced that if I so much as glance at her, her attention will shift from the nurse sitting still as a statue outside our door to me, so I stare straight ahead at the wall. Sleepy waves of deep plum and blueish teal swell and curve along the wall and I slump further and further into my thin mattress. My eyes feel heavy; my head feels heavy; I feel heavy. My roommate is throwing her things into the hall, and the nurse sounds like she has finally been coaxed into action. I am light years away, bobbing through the murky fog in my head.
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via AnneJade
Robert Yerachmiel Snyderman is a PhD student at University of Arizona researching material poetics in contexts of incarceration, homelessness, indiginism & agriculture. Before he worked as a teacher, itinerant farmhand, & street performer. He is at work on several book projects, including Fierce Light: Selected Poems and Poetics of besmilr brigham 1948–1992. New poems, writing for performance, & essays are forthcoming in The New Farmer’s Almanac, Denver Quarterly, The Volta, & The Colorado Review.
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Eugenio Recuenco
In elementary school, while most kids loved field trips, I was terrified by them. Field trips meant my routine would be disrupted. They meant I would be in environments that I didn't know or feel safe in. At the age of seven, I would worry about getting sick on a field trip; worried I wouldn't be taken care of, because I didn't trust anyone except my parents to take care of me. I'm fortunate I was able to trust them so deeply.
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Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, afraid that I am dying all over again. When a white truck drives by, I collapse within myself, afraid to move. I am 3 years old and I am in Mexico. There's images of doctors and a table. Everything is slightly tinted green. Other times, I'm in the recovery room. I'm trying to scream, but nothing comes out. That's when I remember that my mouth is sealed shut. My mother comes to me, and she drips water from a cotton ball onto my cracked lips. How did she know that's what I wanted?
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COURTESY OF TOBY BURROWS
Yes, I am a fat girl. Yes, I am a lazy girl. I have heel spurs. May they ache some more. Suffering is the sole root of my consciousness. So, how have I been 100 lbs overweight? 100 lbs that has made my metabolism and hormones permanently out of whack, and gave my face a beard thatI had to shave every day? Oh yes, suffering is the sole root of my consciousness. My consciousness began with a lie, a lie that I should be treated like a human being.
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Trisha Thompson Adams
There are switches by my hands, little switches that can turn off this, turn on that. A remote control for the television, though I seldom watch it. I prefer the music of Mozart and Bach rather than canned laughter all hours of the day. I prefer nothing canned. Because, that is what I live in. A can. A big, silver bullet of a machine that has kept me alive now for over 60 years.
Read MoreSince discovering the disability community in 1972, Anthony Tusler explains, and enjoys the world through, and from a disability perspective. In his professional and personal activities his goal is to improve the lives of people with disabilities and encourage disability self-determination and culture. Tusler is a writer, photographer, consultant, trainer, and advocate on disability issues. He was the founding Director of the Disability Resource Center at Sonoma State University for 22 years.
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Katherine Streeter
"It’ll make it hard for her to remember a lot of things," he’d said, and so much more. Papa had heard it all, had listened as the doctor used words like aggressive progression and quality of life. Lily had forgotten to listen, had turned instead to the frosted glass plane that separated them from the hall outside, the place where other people were bringing their mamas in too, maybe their papas instead. A brother, a sister, a lover--it didn’t matter here. Walking that long hall toward the doctor’s office was the end of a long journey, a deafening finality.
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