These poems were published as part of the Amplifying Disabled Voices special section, selected by editors Christopher Heuer, Marlena Chertock, and Gregory Luce.

Honest Erasure
     after Mary Karr
     The Burning Girl

went back and forth
     burning. The tonic took the ruby sun.

Lost

     we sprawled along.
           We breathed alongside

the thinnest
arms         all scarred

            with marks she’d made herself —

She sat in flames
              impolite. Later, we’d all think

Doused;
              unmoving. Devouring

light. She
didn’t. She
              touched no aspect of ourselves. I

              the awkward guest.
              An almost ghost. Her mother,

erasing
the edges of herself; smudging.

              Having seen that I testify:

it was ocean endless. She emptied herself
              into that blazing
Child
              with all her slender.

Dwindling.        Her father the devoted king burned
as we all watched. I was

the Friend                 insisting
                              for years.
Doctors, I forced her         sadness
                  close.

I said
that her arms were twigs        scissored
until                                      she slid.
                                            We watched

she was
          gone.                                   She was the tower

                                            We all burned.

Diagnostic Lunes, in 3 parts

Narcissism Lune

Your grief isn’t
yours. Mother says hers
needs more air.

Your body isn’t
yours. Mother says her
reflection means more.

Your life isn’t
yours. Mother says I made
you. A gift.

Migraine lune

My pain’s entrenched
inside my skull, like a
faulty genetic detonator.

Lune for my depression

List of pills
longer than my lifeline
pharmacy of hope.
 

We live here, too.
The beauty of capitalism is that we understand the glory of bootstraps, but
not boots on the ground, so much so, that the other shoe dropping is
actually a country, is actually an earthquake of ancestors and we, pulling up our straps,
pulling on our strings, do not have the capacity to truly understand
the trickle down of blood. That someone else’s wound
could bleed into ours, could stitch us together. Instead we call it infection,
instead one person hoards the gauze because his daddy built the company
from the ground up, but didn’t pick the cotton. And because some
bodies are not built for labor, they are rendered as worthless; disabled by a
system that would rather bury than mend them. We forget
that people are made from cells that are not at first malignant; they can be
healed.
 

On Tuesday nights
we recycle. A friend comes over to help sort glass from compost and carry.
You cannot lift heavy things. Tomorrow, mother is coming for tea. Wants
magic tricks for another Mother’s Day. When you are sober, you will learn
origami again. For now, you have placed a card someone else made of her
favorite flower on the kitchen island. A red string reminder that you must
fill it out before the water boils.

The friend is more efficient. He gathers and breaks down cardboard while
you watch reruns and pharmaceutical promises and give into insomnia’s
dreams. By morning, the daffodils have disappeared with the old residue
from bottles.
Mother is almost here.

She will accept nothing less than fanfare and cursive. You swallow your list
of excuses. You take a shot of whiskey. You pull out a blank card. You laugh
because it is circus-themed and faded; generations of tightrope walkers.
You know her walk in the hallway. The sound of her tongue click and sigh.
There’s a knock at the door only you can answer.

Natalie E. Illum (she/her) is a poet, disability activist, and singer living in Washington, DC. A former Jenny McKean Moore Fellow, she is the recipient of multiple poetry fellowship grants from the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, and is a Best of the Next and Pushcart Prize Finalist. She is a 2025 Pride Fellow and Teaching Artist for the Arts Club of Washington. She was also a founding board member of mothertongue, an LGBTQA+ poetry open mic that lasted for 14 years. Illum competed on the National Poetry Slam circuit and was the 2013 Beltway Grand Slam Champion. Her work has been published on NPR’s Snap Judgement, among various other outlets. Illum earned an MFA in creative writing from American University.

Featured image in this post is, “Pieter Bruegel the Elder – The Tower of Babel (Vienna), Google Art Project edited” By Pieter Brueghel the Elder, licensed creative commons via Wikimedia Commons.