This poem is published as part of the Amplifying Disabled Voices special section, selected by editors Christopher Heuer, Marlena Chertock, and Gregory Luce.
Gentle
I’m gentle with him. He’s fully recovered from his latest surgery and says I don’t need to be so gentle and I wish I could tell him I’ve had a surgery very similar to his and I wish sometimes that people were more gentle with me. But his job is to be vulnerable and mine is not. No – his job is to be whatever he wants to be, whatever he wants me to think he is and mine is to be a very specific thing for him without even asking and making it seem completely spontaneous.
He’s smaller than me and I do what I can not to bring attention to it. Some men aren’t bothered by the height difference but I can tell he is and it makes me sad for him. He’s nice, maybe even too nice and he’s not attractive enough to be anything other than an asshole to me for me to be even slightly turned on. But I know he won’t be into this arrangement for very long because at the moment I’m too big and my hair is too short and he is only with me when he is weak and his money has been spent on medical bills and so I take what I can and so does he.
Abigail Carver is a Florida born, Los Angeles based musician and writer.
Featured image in this post is, “Hand Pinted Kintsugi Pottery Bowl” By Ruthann Hurwitz – licensed creative commons via Wikimedia Commons.
This poem is published as part of the Amplifying Disabled Voices special section, selected by editors Christopher Heuer, Marlena Chertock, and Gregory Luce.
Being Well Is Not
Binary You consider this, munching on handfuls of nicotine gum. What with cells and their porous membranes— boundaries undefined. “How are you feeling?” the doctor asks. “I’m fine, thanks…” off your tongue—reflexive words leap, like a fawn that won’t see the car till it’s too late.
What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him—only you and your disability forms: you tick the box. “Out of 10, how well are you?” You’re back in math class again, wrestling with an unsolvable sum. What’s the right answer? Observe: Porous membranes grow thick—defined edges like boxes we must tick—be quick— the appointment is only 10 minutes.
Your migraine returns, the paperwork doubles, seeing everything in two. Two of you: is “well-you” and “unwell-you” the same? The ‘varying’ box you’d tick— if it existed— but it doesn’t, not in public.
Bad days, zero-spoon days, ‘none-to-scrape-the-ground, to-dig-yourself-out’ days. But if you do—discounted, when someone sees you do one thing.
Panopticon. Surveillance— more monitoring than your bloods get. And you’re deficient in plenty— neutrophils, for starters, to protect—work so hard, they’re running out— the poor things don’t know they can’t protect you from the outside when “outside” is a box to tick.
And if the tick-box is wrong, there’s a bigger box they’ll sit you in.
Maria Lightwood is an autistic, ACE funded writer and disability advocate. Her novel-in-progress, Fractured Tadpoles Grow in the Dark, was shortlisted by Curtis Brown Creative. She has been awarded a place on ITV’s Mentoring Programme and the National Centre for Writing x TLC Free Reads programme. Her flash fiction Sleeping Dogs Lie in Fetal Position received an Honourable Mention in the CRAFT Flash Prose Prize, judged by Meg Pokrass. Maria’s work is shaped by lived experience of multiple disabilities, a refugee and poverty background, and estrangement following a violent upbringing. With no family safety net, she is building a life through writing— with the ambition to redefine disability representation in literature. Most recently, she became a Lead Author for an upcoming feature on Disabled Leaders, published by the Disability Action Research Kollective (DARK), a prominent disabled-led radical publication. She is also contributing to an ACE-funded Reflecting Realities project, and was selected for the CRIPtic x Spread the Word Salon with Cathy Reay.
Featured image in this post is, “Penetentiary Panopticon Plan” By Jeremy Bentham – licensed creative commons via Wikimedia Commons.
These poems are published as part of the Amplifying Disabled Voices special section, selected by editors Christopher Heuer, Marlena Chertock, and Gregory Luce.
Groundhog Day
There is nowhere more confining than a brain with PTSD. I would strip off my neurons if I could, or flee from the crackle of activated synapses reanimating dead moments in relapses and if I could remember who she was before all the damage was done, I would close the door on the in between then and now but I don’t know how.
The Role of a Lifetime
Her field of vision narrows; the periphery expands and looms with a pressure that compresses. Sound and light squeeze.
The children’s voices are microphones. Her spouse’s questions are cymbals. A band plays in her pounding chest, stomping, valves flapping like flags.
Her daily performance is Oscar-worthy. While the stage collapses beneath her, she smiles and pretends, until the curtain shuts abruptly.
The intermissions are sudden. The act lasts until it doesn’t. Everyone whispers: what’s wrong, as she is carried off the stage.
Like they didn’t watch the backdrop shifting, the weight of the walls crushing. They believed she was stronger, because she always holds them up.
Pamela Mathison-Levitt is a disabled writer living in the DMV. She has a master’s degree in psychology in education from the University of Pennsylvania and is passionate about homeschooling her children. Her poems and essays reflect her love of nature, her Unitarian Universalist faith, and her experiences with mental health and chronic illnesses, including: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, among other conditions. Mathison-Levitt’s work has appeared in Mid-Atlantic Review, Exposed Brick Literary Magazine, Pen in Hand, Emerald Coast Review, Literary Mama’s blog, Anthology of Appalachian Writers and other publications. You can find her work on Facebook at Lines and Branches or on Instagram @pmmlevitt.
Featured image in this post is, “Spotlight (14871682502)” By Rikard Edlund: Bass, licensed creative commons via Wikimedia Commons.
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.
These poems are published as part of the Amplifying Disabled Voices special section, selected by editors Christopher Heuer, Marlena Chertock, and Gregory Luce.
Lemon Body
a salesman slaps the roof of my body and declares that it has excellent bones, but i am a towering jenga pile teetering and threatening to topple. i yield where i should be unmovable, and i creak and groan when i should run smooth. this beater is destined for the junk yard, to be salvaged for parts not yet rusted.
but even though my paint is not polished, and doors that should open require a shove, she gets me safely from point A to B. she has velvet-soft seats, feels good in-hand, and can take the long way, to see the sights. i hear myself say, she sure is a beaut.
Lycanthropy
they say there are two wolves within you but i’ve only ever had one she the formidable alpha and i the brittle cage straining to keep her contained
in myth, lunar beams beckon her peeling back black gums baring yellow fangs a gaping maw shaping the call for her kindred in reality, she comes unbidden wild rolling eyes, on all fours heaving cracking my bones like twigs in her jaws
i know she is close to the surface, rumbling she thrusts her furred hide against my trembling tender tissue, incessant threatening to consume me if i dare to keep her inside unwillingly i pare the layers of my flesh with a finger slipping underneath, yielding like soft pith inside the peel of an orange muscle slides over bone below fevered skin, unseamed her narrow frame sluices through the newfound passage
she discards me like a rabbit all the life shaken still the wolf is out and all she does is destroy.
Dayne Blair (she/her) is a disabled lesbian writer, artist and philosopher living on Treaty 4 territory; you might remember her as “That Weird Girl From High School.” Her poetry and prose examine queerness, disability, existential dread, and identity through speculative narratives, fantastic imagery, and humour. She has somehow tricked a local writing group, the Pain Poets, into accepting her as their fourth member. When she’s not at work hacking the planet, she’s spending time with her bird-son Artie or watching horror movies with her loved ones.
Featured image in this post is, “Eurasian wolf 2” By Mas3cf, licensed creative commons via Wikimedia Commons.
