Poetry by Cade Leebron

August 26, 2016

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.

This Is My Secret That I Live With Every Day

August 26, 2016

Listening to my social work colleagues talk about clients: "She is nuts," "She is crazy," "Psycho!"

Shhhhh, stay silent. I have a secret.

Poetry by Audrey T. Carroll

August 26, 2016

an hour of closed eyes ignoring
pseudo hockey mask and tight
quarters of a human shaped
tube like a plastic coffin;

Art by Meredith K Ultra

August 26, 2016

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.

Poetry by Sarah Lilius

August 25, 2016

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.

This Is What It's Like Living with Chronic Lyme Disease

August 25, 2016

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.

My Hospital Stay for Self-Harm

August 25, 2016

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.

Poetry By Robert Yerachmiel Snyderman

August 25, 2016

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.

I Don't Remember a Time Where I Didn't Have Anxiety

August 25, 2016

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.

Art by Celeste Martinez

August 24, 2016

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?

What It's Like Living With Polio & Breathing in an Iron Lung

August 24, 2016

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.

Photography From A Disability Perspective, by Anthony Tusler

August 24, 2016

Since 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.

Her Mother's Diagnosis

August 24, 2016

"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.

Pretty Soon I Will Put These Ghosts To Rest

August 24, 2016

We never went hiking, and the idea of never going hiking together is what broke my heart the most.