Those kids who age prematurely: at seven already sclerotic & gray. & I too! Though at first glance I seem a man long past his youth, just a day or two back I was a boy tossing a softball in the schoolyard. This wretched, incurable curse! One moment of sheer, exuberant joy & the next you’re deaf, bent, gasping for breath, flesh yellowed & splotched, & hands that never stop shaking.
Independent, Reader-Supported Publishing
Poetry
Progeria
Correspondence
I turned seventy this year, and I found Steve Kowit’s poem “Progeria” [July 2014] to be quite poignant. I even sent it to some of my former classmates. I do not share Don Perryman’s feeling [Correspondence, October 2014] that the poem is “obscene” because it compares the aged to those afflicted with the aging disease progeria.
In the letter immediately preceding Perryman’s, Dan Mesh describes his reaction to Joe Wilkins’s short story “Boys, Ten in All” [August 2014]. He writes, “We are all children trapped in progressively aging bodies.” This is what I felt when I read “Progeria.”
What Do You Think?
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Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? Send A Letter
Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? Send A Letter
Also In This Issue
July 2014
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