Tag: illness

Two Poems by Susan Vespoli

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

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.

Inheritance by Laura Denny

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Inheritance

Sometimes my father
was a slapdash carnival,
mercurial, dangerous,
and still my house of mirrors.

He was the thing built up
and then torn down,
reinventing himself
time after time.

He thought I would be
the second coming.
But when I was born a girl
my mother finally realized
he needed to be hospitalized.

I kept my father’s blanket
folded in a closet
and rarely spoke of it.
Would it soothe me
to put my apocalypse
of the heart into words?

Not an ending
but an unveiling
of something that was always
waiting inside me, the thing
I was most afraid of
because it runs in the dark hollows
of my blood where I keep my secrets.
The thing that made me crumble
as it unfolded over my son.

*

Laura Denny is a retired kindergarten teacher who lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. She is a docent for Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. She loves to hike and forest bathe in the Redwoods near her home. Her poetry has appeared in Pictura Journal, Sunlight Press, Remington Review, Last Leaves Magazine, Orchards Review, Amethyst Review, and Macrame Literary Journal.

Waiting for My Medicine by Judy Kronenfeld

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Waiting for My Medicine

In the pharmacy a man sits down across from me,
dragging a long green tube of oxygen
on little wheels; it looks like a torpedo on one of those
collapsible shopping carts or luggage carriers.

He’s got transparent tubing stapling
his nostrils, like the fangs of a snake,
but, as if leaning over a fence, nattering,
he strikes up a conversation with another customer.
He’s not out of breath. He laughs. He jokes.

I want him to stay like that, talking unthroatily,
his long still young legs blazing in front of him,
to prove that things aren’t always
how they seem. But he hears his name.
He shuffles to the pharmacist’s window,
takes out his wallet, shakes his head.
“Costs a hell of a lot to die,” he says.

*

Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her third chapbook is Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Judy’s poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and in such journals as Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, One, ONE ART, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verdad. Her newest book is Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems (Inlandia Institute, 2025). Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Department of Creative Writing, UC Riverside. In another life, she produced scholarship on her English Renaissance loves, George Herbert, John Donne, and Shakespeare, including King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Duke UP, 1998).

Writing Through Illness: A Workshop with Karly Randolph Pitman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Writing through Illness: A Workshop with Karly Randolph Pitman

“Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you. Your feelings need you. Go home and be there for all of these things.”  – Thich Nhat Hanh

Illness – of all shapes and forms – is a complex threshold. As we journey through her doors, we meet change, loss, fear, pain, grief, fatigue, gratitude, wonder, awe – the full mystery of what it means to be human and to live in a human body.

In this online playshop, we’ll explore, write and share our way into a more generous, deeper connection with the complexity that arises when we host an illness in our body’s ‘guest house.’ We’ll use writing practices, presence, and poetry to meet these guests and nurture a more regenerative, curious, and compassionate relationship with our bodies, hearts, and minds. 

What might illness have to share with us? How might it meet us? How might we meet it?

This workshop is open to anyone who’s been touched by illness – their own, a loved one’s, a friend’s – and all kinds of illness – physical illness, mental illness, chronic illness, sudden illness. All levels of writing experience are welcome.

If you can’t join us live, we’ll record our time together so you can explore it later at your own pace. 

***

An image, like a poem, powerfully conveys where we’re headed.

Let Your Grief Wash You to Another Shore 

Used with the kind permission of the artist, Eddy Sara.

Find more about Eddy Sara on his website.

***

Writing Through Illness
Instructor: Karly Randolph Pitman
Date: Thursday, July 17, 2025
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern
Price: Sliding Scale
Event will be recorded

>>> Register for Karly’s workshop <<<

***

~ About The Workshop Leader ~

Karly Randolph Pitman is a writer, teacher, poet, presenter, and mental health facilitator who helps people nurture a more compassionate relationship with their struggles. She’s the founder of Growing Humankindness, a gentle approach towards overeating, writes a reader supported poetry newsletter, O Nobly Born, and offers writing and mindfulness workshops to nurture self awareness and self compassion. She lives in Austin, Texas where she’s cared for the underbelly of long covid and autoimmune illness for the past five years. Her journeys through depression and illness continue to soften, teach and open her. In all she remains in awe of the human heart.

When You Live Alone with a Chronic Illness by Derek Eugene Daniels

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

When You Live Alone with a Chronic Illness

Holidays are the worst. Nothing open, no one
to call if the dizziness worsens. I prefer weekdays
so I can leave the office door open or stay near

the copier, where I’m visible. Weekends –
it depends. I walk around the condo questioning
every time I feel like I’m teetering. No one around

to say this might be normal, maybe okay, perhaps a side effect
of the medicine. Late Friday, almost midnight. I can’t stop
vomiting. I call the nurse hotline, respond to her irrelevant

questions, my phone in one hand, the other clutching
my stomach, my face in the toilet. Would you like me
to just send a vehicle, sir? Her shift must be ending

soon. I make way downstairs to the lobby, inform
the desk attendant to watch for the EMS truck,
his legs sprawled over the counter, watching a portable

television. Two strong men in uniform find me, carry me gently
to the vehicle, the way my father used to hold me close
to his chest when I complained of a stomach ache. As I lie sideways

on the bench, they ask what I do for a living. That must really be
rewarding. After being admitted, I lay in bed, the thin curtain
separating me from coughs, sneezes, conversations I can’t help

but overhear. No one knows I’m here. I fight to stay awake
protecting my wallet this time. Discharged the next morning,
I wonder about my way home. When the nurse replies,

No, none of our service shuttles are available, I walk out alone
on a Saturday morning, crossing empty sidewalks and streets,
the clouds kind enough to hold back the rain.

*

Derek Eugene Daniels is a speech-language pathologist and an associate professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders (speech-language pathology) at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He is a member of Springfed Arts creative writing organization and regularly participates in creative writing workshops. Derek has been a finalist multiple times in the annual Springfed Arts Poetry Contest. His poems have appeared in Call+Response Journal. Derek is passionate about self-expression, intersectionality, and his work with marginalized communities. In 2023, Derek received the Professional of the Year Scholar and Service Award from the National Stuttering Association for his scholarly and community service contributions to the stuttering community. In 2025, he received the William T. Simpkins, Jr., Service Award from the National Black Association for Speech-Language and Hearing for his notable contributions to the organization. Derek enjoys country music, 80s music, 80s and 90s television shows, and handwritten notes.

Lost by Ashley Kirkland

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Lost

I’ve lost my mother many times, enough
to fill a lifetime. She is always slipping away
from me. The first time (a classic) in a 90’s turn of events

in a department store, I pressed my face to soft silk shirts
& got lost in a rack of clothing. A woman found me crying
in the center of the circular rack. Years later, we nearly lost

her when her heart blew open in the living room,
her aorta fraying like the end of a rope. The ghost I was floated
across campus for weeks. A teacher called me honey

and I nearly cried: nearly motherless at 21. Now, 36,
my husband and I talk in the kitchen on a Sunday
afternoon, rain drizzling in late November, football helmets

clashing on the tv in the other room, and we talk about her
health as if it concerns us and I say he’ll be devastated,
referring to our older son, who loves my mother. She doesn’t realize

I say who she’s hurting by not taking care of herself as if her health
is something within our control. I was 21 & I said goodbye to her
over the phone and drove home while she was in surgery,

her chest splayed open on the operating table, her aorta
a patchwork. Now, 36, I stop and listen every time I hear sirens
to see if they turn in the direction of her street. I lose her again

and again, dread the day when I get the call (again),
when my father tells me to come home now, and I have to tell
my son, in words I don’t yet know, what has happened.

*

Ashley Kirkland writes in Ohio where she lives with her husband and sons. Her work can be found in Cordella Press, Boats Against the Current, The Citron Review, Naugatuck River Review, HAD, Major7thMagazine, among others. Her chapbook, BRUISED MOTHER, is available from Boats Against the Current. She is a poetry editor for 3Elements Literary Review. You can find her at lashleykirkland.bsky.social and lashleykirklandwriter on Instagram.

Two Poems by Bethany Jarmul

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Poem In Which I Bleed

for the first time at 13, at that charismatic church
up that gravel road in that rural Appalachian town
during youth group, with the four of us teens,
our fathers the church’s only deacons. I fled

the purple carpet & purple padded chairs
& purple banner with El Shaddai & a dove
hand-stitched & locked myself in the women’s room
with red & red & red. I thought to use my sock,

as I’d read in some preteen magazine, but I looked down
& saw my Old Navy flip flops. Some wadded up
toilet paper would have to do. In the sanctuary, I sat
cross-legged for an hour, stealing glimpses

at Jesus’ portrait, the blood dripping down his brow
from every thorn, as I squeezed my thighs
until they were sore. At home, I threw the soiled garment
in the trash. When I confessed to mom

she rescued the panties & scrubbed them
in the tub. Scolding me, for in that house
wastefulness was the darkest stain & blood
was how we were cleansed like snow.

*

When a Friend Tells Me I Look Beautiful Because I’ve Lost Weight Due to Prolonged Illness

Many things wither away—
a scorched tomato plant,

an orchid never watered,
a worm on hot cement,

a slug when salted,
a tire riddled with nails,

a balloon with a hole in its skin,
the runt kitten unable to suckle,

a miscarried twin.
They are beautiful too.

They remind me I’m not alone
in my diminishing.

*

Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian writer and poet. She’s the author of a poetry collection, Lightning Is a Mother and a mini-memoir, Take Me Home. Her work has been published in many magazines including Rattle, Brevity, and Salamander. Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2023 and Best Small Fictions 2024, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on social media: @BethanyJarmul

Two Poems by Theresa Senato Edwards

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination Before a Cure can be Determined

         After Torrin A. Greathouse

As a little girl, I often
began counting my steps—
cat in a cage
designed to pace back and forth.
Easy to mistake cat for a child
fighting her own thoughts,
gathering fear
heavy into the day. My
illness, what’s
jammed into my brain:
kingdom of doubt.
Little girl always looking for
mother to help stop worries,
not real ones, mostly
ominous thoughts of
parents dying. Or
quiet repetition—touch doorknobs—
rituals to save the world.
Silent savior-child of woe,
the only way to grow
until she couldn’t
volunteer her stories
without her mother
xeroxing each one.
Young, precious mind
zoned—to trust nothing.

*

Your Last Months

We watched you watch
each wall in our oldest sister’s—

your caretaker’s—spare room,
look for children playing

in the paintings. Bedridden,
you were too weak to color

in the lines. Your torso lengthened;
fat that once cushioned your bones

fell invisibly, air revealed every
crack and crevice of what it was

to be a 69-year-old dying woman.
Grief kaleidoscoped into your stomach,

pain. You used your survival instinct
until you couldn’t eat anymore.

We forgot what your body could do before
all this: dance at weddings, kiss wildly,

hold your great niece on your wide hip.

*

Theresa Senato Edwards has published 3 poetry books—1, with painter Lori Schreiner, winning The Tacenda Literary Award—and 2 chapbooks. Nominated twice for a Pushcart, once for Best of the Net, and once for Best Small Fictions, Edwards is also a full-length poetry manuscript reader for Trio House Press. Her website is http://www.theresasenatoedwards.com.

Two Poems by Jenna Wysong Filbrun

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Illness

When a windstorm
blasts in from the north
with a sudden
and desperate rage,
even the cottonwoods bow
to the white sheets of rain.

Behind the single
silver-green leaf
plastered to the glass
of the patio door, you can see
the awful flailing
of the trees flying apart
like someone drowning.

When all you can do
is keep your heart
close to the hurt,
you keep it close.

*

Like It Was

Yesterday, a finch
flutter-flapped from the barn
like the sound of a horse
clearing its nose.
I could smell the sweet
sweat smell of the horse
coming around the corner.
Hear ripe grass ripping
into crunch and chew,
snort and stomp,
swish swish toss of tail.
Sometimes the old life
passes over this way, smooth
and warm like a neck,
like a velvet nose
lipping my hair.

*

Jenna Wysong Filbrun is the author of the poetry collection, Away (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and have appeared in publications such as The Dewdrop, Gyroscope Review, Wild Roof Journal, and others. Find her on Instagram @jwfilbrun.

My Heart is a Shattered Windshield by Victoria Melekian

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

My Heart is a Shattered Windshield

Four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, I’ve driven
three hours to a Best Western in the crappy part of town
for my son’s doctor appointment in the morning.
The desk clerk asks if I’m here on business or pleasure.

I look at the mangled Von’s grocery cart in the empty parking lot
through smudges on the glass lobby door. “Pleasure,” I say,
but the truth is neither. Untreated, my son’s life expectancy
is two point eight years. His disease can be managed,

but not cured, and the cost of medication is near impossible.
The truth is we’ve waited thirteen months for insurance
approval to see this specialist. The truth is I’m a howling
windstorm of fear—my boy is thirty-seven, not even middle aged.

I don’t yet know there is hope, that tomorrow the doctor will reach
into a drawer and toss my son a six-thousand-dollar miracle drug,
a bottle of pills lobbed across his desk like a red and yellow
beach ball sailing through a shimmering summer sky.

*

Victoria Melekian lives in Carlsbad, California where the weather is almost always perfect. She writes poetry and short fiction. You can read her work here: www.victoriamelekian.com