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.
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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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Lisa Marie Basile / thedarkpart
We never went hiking, and the idea of never going hiking together is what broke my heart the most.
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Brandi Redd
She takes her fork and knife and slices into the chicken breast, shredding its skin and meat into pieces, bite-sized, the silvery shining blade into her meal and then, miraculous, the fork delivering food into her mouth that is savory, delicious. Then, halfway through her rapid-fire chewing and swallowing and consumption, the familiar, cloying nausea returns, a twinge that hits Rachel all at once like a gymnast toppling from a balance beam. The chicken transforms from tender to a sickly, vinegarish paste that coats the insides of her throat. Concentrate, Rachel thinks, demanding that the food stay safely contained in her body. I will not. I will not. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
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Patty Maher
The people you love will quit letting you love them. People will call you a slut. You’ll get arrested. You’ll be labeled a moral degenerate. You’ll never be able to run for office. Doctors will think you’re out for scrips. Your pain will be misinterpreted.
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Anton Corbijn
I killed myself at 11:54 PM on Tuesday, April 28, 2015. My body was not discovered until Monday, May 11--a full thirteen days after I had died. Method of suicide was a combination of several tricks: overdose of sleeping pills, alcohol consumption, with cause of death officially listed as asphyxiation. That was because I stuck a small lid (hair gel, maybe?) on my nose and mouth and then wrapped my head in Saran wrap. I passed out before my body realized that there was not enough air to keep breathing for long. I didn’t die from lack of oxygen, which is what most people think when they hear "asphyxiation," but rather, died from carbon dioxide poisoning. There was too much carbon dioxide in the small pocket I left for air.
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Maren Klemp
"Well when I was in parochial school we used to stuff comic books in our Bibles to read during religion class. We liked to draw dicks on the characters. This one time I drew this huge dick on a villain who had a human body with a moose head. It was so perfect I started laughing. You should have seen that nun’s face when she saw me laughing hysterically in Religion class. When she scurried over and found that comic between the Bible pages her face turned so red I thought it was about to explode. The entire time while she beat me with her ruler I couldn’t stop laughing."
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Rafal Michalak
I tried to imagine how it would be like to see the world once the disease had won: first in fragments, then in shadows until my eyes gave out like a pair of faulty light bulbs, and I would see only blackness. No light. All that I have known about the world would change. All color, drained. The ground would feel like quicksand and I would grope around like a newborn.
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Anano Miminoshvili
Samuel Fox is the 2014 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Collegiate Poet for Western Carolina. His work has been published in Full of Crow, 13 Magazine, and The Nomad. He currently attends Western Carolina University as an undergraduate and is involved with the Asheville, North Carolina slam poetry scene. He moonlights as a jazz guitarist who cannot sing and is working on a book of poems titled Fierce Anatomies. He works at Hunter Library’s Special Collections on Western Carolina University’s campus.
Read MoreNo one offers to help me search. They thought I was joking, that this was just me being good ol’ quirky Janie--messy and silly and fun to be around. The girl they loved to be photographed standing next to, chronically pantsless and prone to disappearing for days at a time. The girl who never brushed her hair and never asked for anything.
Read MoreAfter a few months of living with flies, the dust canister of your vacuum cleaner is coated in dark gray goo. When you empty it, you have to find something to scrape the fly guts off the inside. There is a distinctive smell that is slightly sweet and more-than-slightly nauseating. You count the fly bodies, as if knowing the number of carcasses you vacuum will convince someone that it really is as bad as you say it is. Fifty-seven in the bathtub, thirteen on the counter, but when you try to count the pile in front of the sliding glass door, you lose track somewhere past fifty.
Read MoreOne random day in July of 2000, without having done a single thing to earn it, my little brother was burdened with the threat of a shortened life unless he learned to stay disciplined in his eating and medicating habits from that day forward. In Connor’s head, the whole world owes him. With a frustrated and tearful look, he will tell you God owes him.
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