Tag: cancer

Two Poems by Susan Vespoli

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Bitch

               “Better Bitch Than Mouse”
               ~ Ruth Bader Ginsberg

The Cancer Care Center is on the third floor
of a four-story rectangular prism on 3rd Street
whose overflow parking lot faces a food pantry
where we often see a line of the Phoenix hungry
and Christopher holds my hand as we walk toward
the building I have grown to loathe even though
the receptionist, Mike, is nice, slightly droll,
as he snaps another plastic I.D. bracelet around my wrist,
even though we tagged my young blond doctor Boy Genius
on the first meeting, even though the nurses flutter around
the big-windowed mini-gymnasium of pleather chairs
like angels, even though there are photos of dogs
in party hats dangling from strings and a wide basket
of packaged snacks like Chips Ahoy and Rice
Crispy Treats and they offer us cold water bottles
and warm blankets and there are big screens
blathering home decorating shows from the wall
and a glass display case of wigs and hats and bras
for sale in the entry and a view from our chairs
of flat rooftops surrounded by a panorama of desert
mountains.           It is 2025, in the fire-hot summer
month of the sturgeon full moon, and I hate it more
every time I swim in to strike another bargain
with death; all of us have. We never knew we’d end
up here together: the young woman sleeping fetal
position in a chair, old man in a hillbilly beard
and baggy jeans, dude in a basketball uniform.
We are bald, patchy haired, or capped in turbans.
We are nauseous or munching on free processed crap.
Or we (i.e. me) are bitchy, questioning each shot,
each treatment and the garbage pail of side effects,
my partner growing weary of my boat rocking,
asking, can’t you just trust the doctors? to which I snap NO.
My therapist affirms anger as a necessary grief stage
and I say fury and I say I know I can be a bitch
and I say it’s hard to be one’s highest self when things
are hard and she says our higher self doesn’t mean sweet
and she says BITCH is an acronym for Babe In Total Charge
of Herself                      and I breathe.

*

Self Portrait as Patient

I pop half a Xanax before my appointment,
but it doesn’t really help. I am not a drug person

and my oncologist wears bright orange Nikes
as he makes his rounds, smiles and waves
at me in my corner chair next to the exit

where I can be invisible, yet scope the room
while clear chemicals enter my veins through tangled tubes

and they call this drip an infusion and the rules
post-chemo are no kissing or exchanging bodily fluids

for three days and to launder all linens and clothes in hot water.
I      pop      half      a      Xanax      before      my      appointments

so I can be invisible, close my eyes and disappear.
My one-positive-affirmation-a-day calendar
recently read: “I can do hard things,”

to which I replied, “fuck you.” I don’t want to do any more
hard things. I want peace and ease and to eat dessert after every meal.

*

Susan Vespoli is a poet from Arizona who believes in the power of writing to heal. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART: a journal of poetry, The New Verse News, Rattle, and other cool spots. She is the author of four books of poetry and teaches Wild Writing for 27 Powers and writers.com. Susan Vespoli – Author, Poet

NOVEMBER by Elizabeth Conway

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NOVEMBER

I wish I was a Great Blue Heron
standing on one leg in the Clark Fork River
clutching ancient bedrock
in my talons for balance
instead of your waist
to hold you upright
so the cancer that stole
your steadiness
won’t pull you to
the floor while you
brush your hair.

*

Raised in St. Cloud, Minnesota, Elizabeth Conway has her MFA from the University of Montana, Missoula. Her fiction has been a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Open Fiction contest, Reed Magazine’s John Steinbeck Award and The Southeast Review’s World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest. You can also find her work in the ‘Weird Sisters’ Lilac City Fairy Tales anthology by Scabland Books, New Flash Fiction Review, Blue Earth Review, Fractured Lit, and elsewhere. Her chapter “A Fire at Valleyview Nursing Home” recently won Uncharted Magazine’s Novel Excerpt Contest, judged by Cynthia Pelayo. In addition, Conway is a recipient of the Michael Kenneth Smith Fellowship.

Earlier, Jane Kenyon by Allison Blevins

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Earlier, Jane Kenyon

entered a conversation, both omen and curse.
So many poems begin after diagnosis, many of yours,
and now, all of mine. Lady Jane, our oracle of otherwise,
remind me to slow down. I am in no hurry—any longer—
to get where I am going.

*

Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer and the author of five chapbooks and four collections. Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize, Allison serves as the Publisher of Small Harbor Publishing and lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. allisonblevins.com

Four Poems by J.R. Solonche

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PIN OAK

The tree man came to do tree work.
You should cut down that dead pin oak, he said.
Why? I said.
It’s dead. It could fall in the first big storm, he said.
How long has it been dead? I said.
Hard to say. When did it leaf out last? he said.
I’m not sure. Two or three years ago maybe, I said.
You should get rid of it, he said.
What’s the proper period of mourning for a dead pin oak? I said.
I never heard of a proper period of mourning for a tree, he said.
Me neither, but I’m starting it. Four years for a pin oak, I said.

*

MIRROR

I saw an old mirror
at the side of the road
to be picked up with
the trash. I stopped to
look at myself in it,
but it was very old and
cracked and missing
most of the silver backing,
so it was more of a window
than a mirror, a window
looking out at a wall
looking back at me.
I should have taken it home.
It’s the perfect mirror for
me, old man that I am.

*

CANCER

My friend, Yvonne, is a poet.
She has cancer, so she’s been
writing “cancer poems.” They
are very, very good poems.
They have been published in
The Hudson Review and JAMA.
Congratulations, I said. Please
don’t say that. I wish I didn’t
have to write them, she said.
I understand, but you do, and
you did because you must,
I said. Still, I wish it weren’t such
a must when there is so much
else to write about, she said.
You do write about so much else,
I said. Yes, but it all smells of chemo,
she said. Even the roses, even them.

*

BARREN ROAD

I have a friend who lives
on Barren Road. It’s a
shame he’s not a poet.
“It’s a shame you’re not
a poet,” I said. “Why’s
that?” he said. “Because
you live on Barren Road,”
I said. “So that’s why it’s
a shame I’m not a poet?”
he said. “Yeah. Consider
the irony,” I said. “I do.
I’ve been considering it
all the time since it really
was barren,” he said. “I’m
surprised at you. This is
the first time you said it’s
a shame I’m not a poet.
Well, I think it’s a shame
you are. A damn shame.
What a waste of a mind,”
he said. I understand.
He’s a sociologist.

*

Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of 38 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

I Text My Friend with Cancer “How are you doing?” by Karen Paul Holmes

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I Text My Friend with Cancer “How are you doing?”

He answers I am dying.
I can’t imagine typing I am dying,
like stating I’m finishing War and Peace.

Calendars full of treatments, ending.
Two surgeries nearly taking him.
He told me last year he had three years left—
maybe—but was fighting to see
his last child graduate.

Today, he says his last reading next month—
in a state where he used to live—
is a chance to say goodbye.
He lists all he’s grateful for. A big list,
and it comforts me. I’m a faraway friend,
and this dying man is comforting me.
I want to ask Has knowing been better
than not knowing?

It seems unbearably real to say
I am dying. To be on the other side of hope,
no longer seeing past the earth’s edge.
Do we all have that kind of brave in us?

Or is there still hope, but of a different kind?
A hope for the light at a shaded path’s end—
like those near-death have seen.
A glimpse of that shining.
That beautiful beaconing.

*

Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her two books are: No Such Thing as Distance and Untying the Knot. Poetry credits include The Writer’s Almanac, The Slowdown, Verse Daily, Diode, and Plume.

Two Poems by Lisa Low

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LATE IN THE DAY

Late in the day when my father lay dying,
he called me to his cot and told me of
a time when I saved his life. Saved your life?
I said, not believing him. Then he said:
do you remember that time at Widow’s
Lake when, like a fool, I got in water,
thinking it would make my bad back better,
but as I lay on my side, unable to move,
and felt myself tipping, back side up,
face down in water, I saw you walking
on water beside me and called out your
name and asked for your hand. You were
only five. If you hadn’t been there that
day, that would have been the day I died.

*

MY NEIGHBOR GETS A CANCER DIAGNOSIS

What’s it like to know cancer sneaks like
a tongue of smoke around the back doors
of your life, peeking in windows between
the shadows, snaking around corners,
sniffing and moaning; wanting your suffering.
My neighbor at sixty retires, done with chemo
for now, decides to babysit his three-year-old
granddaughter, Daisy. Days, I watch them
totter down the street, his bulky hand sunk
sealed to the fresh flesh of her reached-up hand.
Or see him mowing the grass, going over and
over the bright, green stalks, not knowing when
that menace will force its fierce, forked tongue
up from soft ground to take him down again.

*

Lisa Low’s essays, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, The Tupelo Quarterly, and The Adroit Journal. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of literary journals, among them Valparaiso Poetry Review, Pennsylvania English, Phoebe, American Journal of Poetry, Delmarva Review, and Tusculum Review.

Three Poems by Faith Shearin

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Telephone Booths

I shut the door and wept over failed math tests
and wayward boyfriends, told my mother
about bad cafeteria food, nosebleeds, my part
in the school play. At summer camp I found them

between cabins in a forest of old growth pines
and settled myself on a shelf-like seat, held the stiff
silver cord like something umbilical. Phone booths were
liminal spaces, both public and private —

a contradiction I loved. They were the size
of closets, confessionals, coffins. Though
mostly extinct I passed one
this summer in an open field — each pane of glass
reflecting swaying wildflowers — and remembered

the distant disembodied voice of my grandfather
and the way Clark Kent became Superman.

*

My Sister, Age Two

My sister, age two, stands with her back to the camera
dressed in a diaper and our mother’s high heeled shoes.
The image is grainy, low quality — some sort of instant

Polaroid with oversized white borders — but in the dim light
I can make out woven wallpaper, shag carpet and,
inside a wooden console, the fat TV we owned

in 1978 — antennae wrapped in aluminum foil
to improve the stormy reception. She is thin
with a thatch of unruly hair and one hand rests

on her hip, as if she’s already stepping into the wobbly
shoes of adulthood, preparing for the epic battles
with our mother and the year she will spend

at our father’s bedside. This is different from the prints
in which she rests like a doll in the arms of every vanishing
grandparent, different from the portraits in which she stands

beside our brother, a full head
shorter than he is though she is a year and a half older.
It is different even from the snapshots in which she wears

a t-shirt that labels all the bones of her skeleton
or has built herself a winged mosquito
costume for Halloween. She is nearly

naked except for the shoes, and alone,
and already herself in the shadowy frame: unaware
of the camera’s gaze, or too elated to care that she

has been caught stealing beauty from our mother’s closet.

*

My Father’s Cancer was like the Loch Ness Monster

The Loch Ness monster is a shape shifter:
a serpentine creature, sometimes pink,

sometimes black, her long neck and humps rising
from a misty lake in the Scottish Highlands; she slithers

in vague photos and sonar readings and might be
a swimming elephant from a visiting circus, a wind slick,

or some oversized eel. She may or may not have drowned
men and it is difficult to say

whether she is furry or scaly. Likewise my father’s
skin cancer began in his ear but metastasized —

masquerading as a cyst above his eye — and, in this way,
went undetected by scans until the full malignancy

uncoiled beneath the surface of his face; his cancer
travelled on nerves, eroding bones,

which was like drifting on hidden currents,
and still a late and painful biopsy

proved inconclusive. In Glen Mor, on the shores of River Ness,
which flows into Moray Firth

where deep waters rise and fall
there were unexplained sightings — a wriggling and churning, a large

stubby-legged animal resembling a salamander —
which was like my father seeing double

as his eyelid began to droop. The Loch Ness monster
continues to elude investigators who imagine her as a wooden head

attached to a submarine, or the leg of a hippo stuck
to an umbrella, or a moose

or camel, or as some ancient marine reptile — a dinosaur maybe —
that escaped the cretaceous period though this wasn’t

supposed to be possible.

*

Faith Shearin’s seven books of poetry include: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Telling the Bees (SFA University Press), Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press), and Lost Language (Press 53). Her poems have been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. She has received awards from Yaddo, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her essays and short stories have won awards from New Ohio Review, The Missouri Review, The Florida Review, and Literal Latte, among others. Two YA novels — Lost River, 1918 and My Sister Lives in the Sea — won The Global Fiction Prize, judged by Anthony McGowan, and have been published by Leapfrog Press.

Consumed by Edward Lee

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CONSUMED

Grief consumes my heart,
a cancer devastating
all in its indifferent path,

almost a kissing cousin
to the cancer
that took you from me,
savage and swiftly.

*

Edward Lee’s poetry, short stories, non-fiction and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen, The Blue Nib and Poetry Wales. His play ‘Wall’ was part of Druid Theatre’s Druid Debuts 2020. His debut poetry collection “Playing Poohsticks On Ha’Penny Bridge” was published in 2010. He is currently working towards a second collection.

He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Orson Carroll, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy.

His blog/website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com