Cancer

Standards of Care

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:45 -0400

The reason Black women were used to develop the field of gynecology was because they were no more than property. They weren’t seen as people; they were just seen as things. The controlling of Black women’s bodies started with chattel slavery, but it continues today.

The Feeding

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

Some leeches have two jaws. Others have three. Some have teeth on their tongues. There are protective leeches who hover over their eggs, and leeches who carry their newborns in pouches like tiny kangaroos.

Our Fraying Hearts

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

I have a sense of the drama people want to hear about, but most days our ER is filled with abdominal pain and vomiting—nothing like what you’re accustomed to seeing on TV.

The Dead of Dream Town

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

As the majority population of Dream Town, the dead hold all elective offices. They determine the hours of the municipal pool. (Midnight swimming!) They program traffic lights to operate on peculiar patterns: Some never turn red. Others never turn green.

Stirring the Pot

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Leading a strike, starting trouble between sisters, feeding strangers

Love in All Directions

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Sometimes you had to conjure your own joy. Scratch that. Most of the time you had to conjure your own joy. So you had better suck it up and start chopping onions.

Celebrating

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 11:00:00 -0500

A fiftieth anniversary in Paris, a COVID Christmas in April, a first birthday in America

Considerable Luck

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

In the weeks before my surgery I wandered parks and refuges where black-crowned night herons clung to cattails, pied-billed grebes fished ponds, and raucous crows cawed and flew upwind to find branches where they could shelter together. They would aim for a tree, fail to settle as a flock, then fall back and regroup to try again. Like the crows, I wouldn’t quit.

Selected Poems

sybil.smith7@gmail.com — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

I know now, / having woken / and climbed away from you / in the chill / that I can do it. / Cast a spell / on my body.

The Healer

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

He was riding the train to his teaching job when he heard about Skimmer’s bike accident in a post from another college friend. It was noon in Tokyo, where he was an English instructor; his conversation school opened in thirty minutes. Skimmer had been one of his closest friends in college. They’d lived on the same floor for two years and had shared an off-campus house with others for three years after that. Skimmer had started mountain biking their first semester in the house. Sometimes he would have accidents, and his blood would smear the bathtub while he dressed his wounds. But then he would clean, and when Skimmer cleaned, he scrubbed and wiped and penetrated each corner, calling upon a small orchestra of sprays and rags, brushes and solutions. It was like watching Leonard Bernstein scour a tub.

The Telephone Mode

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0400

I find talking on the phone to be one of the purest forms of communication. You are receiving the person’s voice, their tone, their laughter, without the distraction of their clothing, their hairdo, their body. I don’t care what someone looks like. I want to hear them sigh with exhaustion or cackle with delight. I want to hear tiny details of the environment from which they speak: birdsong, barking dogs, the beep of a microwave.

Timing

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0400

A broken clock, a chance encounter, a long-distance relationship

The Next Peak

tfd3@psu.edu — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0400

The mountain in winter enables the kind of sleep that restores, heals, allows brains to solve problems. The days have more than enough darkness to crawl inside.

Shaving

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0400

A teenage rite of passage, a prison barber, a husband’s unfamiliar face

A Knife at the Throat

cow2pie@aol.com — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0400

We had never heard of a kid who had cancer. We knew of teenagers who’d been killed in farming accidents and at least a few who had been maimed riding ATVs with no helmets, their skulls coming into contact with country roads. But not cancer. It seemed like something that happened to aunts and uncles. Combined with the lack of rain and the impending foreclosure, 1983 was beginning to feel apocalyptic.

Home Sick

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.

His Body Of Work

cow2pie@aol.com — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:05:00 -0500

I loved my father’s body. It worried me, too. . . . I didn’t know what polio was, but it sounded scary, and he had survived it. This helped form my view of him as someone who could survive almost anything. Like Wile E. Coyote, he might get hurt and maimed, but he never, ever gave up.

What I Don’t Tell My Wife

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 04:05:00 -0400

There are many things I don’t tell my wife of ten years: Because she has asked me not to. Because she carries her own burdens. Because she has told me mine are too much.

Chasing Hawks

Sun, 30 Apr 2023 04:00:00 -0400

After the radiation ruined her lungs, / and they’d drained fluid once a month, / then every other week, then every day, / my grandma said she wanted to go / home.

The Den Mother Has Her Say

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 05:00:00 -0500

Before we eat our snow cones, pet this dog. Don’t expect to earn a Wolf badge for your troubles. . . . Move slowly down the back, like you’re taking your fingers on a trip, until you get to the bulge on the haunch. Yes, it’s a tumor. Yes, it’s cancerous. Pet it like it’s nothing special, just part of the dog.

Something In The Water

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 05:00:00 -0500

The cows were getting sick and wasting away. They were developing tumors. Their teeth were turning black. Calves were stillborn or born with cloudy or deformed eyes.

Growth

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 05:05:00 -0500

Being in remission is like air: you only appreciate it when it’s gone. After four years of not appreciating it, I’m back on Vancouver Island, where I work at the university as a cafeteria dishwasher.

Lawrence The Enormous

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 04:00:00 -0400

Slowly, Heidi finished the last of her champagne. She wiped her lipstick from the glass with her thumb, and something stirred inside Lawrence.

Inheritance

Thu, 27 May 2021 04:05:00 -0400

I would like to give you a metaphor that describes what it’s like to potentially pass on to one’s children a pathogenic variant that will possibly go on to kill them, but everything I am coming up with is histrionic.

Spam From The Dead

jamesdavismay@gmail.com — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 04:10:00 -0400

And two months after the cancer finally ate through / the last tissues that separated him from death, / I get a message from his e-mail address, / urging me to click on a link I know I shouldn’t

Something I Might Say

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 05:00:00 -0500

I read all the literature hospice brought: Give the gift of comfort and calm. Give them support, permission. Give them more than they gave you.

Debris

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 16:00:00 -0400

When Sarah’s mother, Penny, got sick four years into our marriage, we decided to move back to Mississippi, considering it penance for the sins of our youth. We signed a lease on a house, a white one-story on the historical register with a wraparound porch and angels, stars, and the moon painted on the transom above the front door.

The Hairdresser

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 00:00:00 -0400

sees the old woman — wheelchair bound, pushed by her daughter — glance / out the window, and goes in back / to fetch a shower cap. The woman tugs her daughter’s shirt and says, almost / inaudibly, It’s raining. / And it is raining. Barely.

How It Ends

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 -0500

It begins like this: You drop your son off at kindergarten. His first day of school. You think that nothing in your life will be as big as this: the moment he drops your hand, he who has clung to you since birth, since that first breath of air, first scream, first frantic rooting for the breast.

Bravery

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Facing the police, facing your parents, facing the truth