This poem is published as part of the Amplifying Disabled Voices special section, selected by editors Christopher Heuer, Marlena Chertock, and Gregory Luce.
 

Neuropathy as a Treasure Map

Freshborn scalpel slicing through skullcap,
the metallic taste of limes fizzing. When
you repot a plant you untangle, shake out
the soil, sometimes more capable hands
Separate root and reminders into two
plants. Bone clicks apart, tectonic plates
shuffling, tap dancing on the instability.
Doctors hands slip into wet silk,
meninges as latex gloves, wiggling.
Sometimes they shake you so hard
a piece of you breaks off and gets stuck
somewhere incorrect in the system.
If you inject alcohol into the prefrontal
cortex in just the right place – they
want you to call it psychosurgery now.
Can you remember that? Your tattoos
are probably not moving. Close your
head. Apply magnetics. Shake vigorously.
A liquid IV of horse wobblifier, to give
you strength and vitality. Bite down
hard so they know when to stop. Your
entire eye socket has gone blue, what
have you been dreaming about now?
Someone is grabbing a tree sprouting
from my amygdala and putting pressure
against my brain stem, they tug –
they tug, they tug, my sister falls out,
she is still dead, tug, drink, drink, drink,
vodka mixed with French wine, you are
still dead. They’ve wrenched out too much
meat and none of it matter, or all of it,
or my ex lover and his heroin, winking,
and I wink back and my eye never opens
again. And I count from one to fifteen
like a twenty seven year old never could.
And they shake. Bone fragments and
swellings that hush like the sea when
shaken rain onto the operating chair. I
forgot what they were looking to remove,
I hope they got it. I remember to hope,
they got it. I remember, I. She used to be
such a nice girl. Now she is freshly dug
soil in neatly tilled lines beneath yew trees
that hold her hands underground
and they tug. And someone says I feel
much better now. Is it over yet? Is it over?

 
A Simple Diagnosis

Hot night, mid-July / I would kill for a hairband right now / I like roses better when they wither / all my favourite things are dead, or dying, or disabled / which in my country sometimes feels synonymous / and I can’t sleep / and the sky doesn’t even have the decency to put on a light show for me / I watched the sky split like a bursting lip from this window / the night Boris Johnson was elected / and now we have the right kind of government / and no one goes to prison for protesting oil / and no one sells bombs / and no one lies awake at night wishing they weren’t denied support for their health conditions / just because the system failed to notice them before you turned eighteen / and no one is hungry / and no one is dead / and we are no one / but tonight’s not about that / the temperature is a sulk / and I am losing my temper with my body / overstimulated by the seasons / protesting things I cannot change / hitting my nose against a brick wall / to spite my deeply political face / I will smile at the news reporters / all nosebleeds and lips bruised the colour of this night / I will give them three hundred thousand reasons why fourteen years of my life drove me to this / and they’ll say, autism.

 
After Van Gogh’s Blue Room

The floorboards look like they’ve been scratched. Like walls scratched with breaking fingernails hung from a noose. Like tallies of time. Like a prison. Like a prisoner trying to survive. Like lying on the floor, cheek to cold wood. Like insects are welcome to break up the monotony. Like splinters are welcome too close to the eyeball, to insert jeopardy. There’s two tones of wood. Perhaps some is more worn than others. Perhaps he paces near the camera. Perhaps this is the signs of anxiety. Of pain. Perhaps the room is made of the shadows under the bed (the same tone as everywhere else). Perhaps the monsters are spreading. Perhaps the unhappiness is spreading. Perhaps pain is awake.
 

Kathryn O’Driscoll is a queer, disabled poet, mentor, editor and spoken word event organiser from Bath, England. She was the 2021 U.K. Poetry Slam Champion and a World Slam Finalist. She was longlisted for the Disabled Poets Prize and the Outspoken Prize for Performance Poetry in 2023, and the Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Artist in 2022. In 2021 she was one of the featured poets on the (BAFTA winning) Sky Arts spoken word TV show Life and Rhymes. Her debut collection ‘Cliff Notes’ is available from Verve Poetry Press.

Featured image in this post is, “La Chambre à Arles, by Vincent van Gogh, from C2RMF” By Vincent van Gogh, 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.
 

A Disabled Person’s Guide to Survival

Don’t bother with weapons. Those are for abled people.
You don’t have the mobility to [hit, throw, aim] and the adrenaline
of a fight will kill you. Instead, learn more passive survival skills:
how to move around a room and write
without eyesight; memorize pills by size, texture and taste.
Brush up on your pantomime for the months when language
becomes unreachable. Learn to recognize the way the air changes
when you’re not alone, the faint smell of each new body.
If someone breaks in, piss yourself. I mean it. Do not underestimate
the power of the grotesque, an unwelcome surprise. Do not expect your
self-defense to look like theirs. Do not expect a fair fight.
You can do a lot with household items if you get creative.
You will need to get creative.
 

Emily Pinkerton is the author of three chapbooks: Natural Disasters (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2016), Bloom (Alley Cat Press, 2018) and Adaptations (Nomadic Press, 2018; Black Lawrence Press, 2023). Her full-length collection, All Hazards, was selected as a finalist for the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and a semi-finalist for the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Poetry Award. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from The Writers Grotto, Alley Cat Books, and USF Verftet. More of Emily’s publications can be found at thisisemilypinkerton.tumblr.com, on Bluesky (@poetryfriend), or on instagram (@thisisemilypinkerton).

Featured image in this post is, “All yellow household jumble 2020-03-28 Focus stack” by Franz van Duns, 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.
 

Duloxetine

i wake and step toward the dreadtime /
crouched in casualty posture / it’s hard

to straighten / these days / always con-
striction / in the fascia lattice / in class

/ silk filaments fall on my face / i am
told to leave them there / not real /

stop picking at yourself / as if my skin
is a crawling / to be solved only with

patience / if only i could work my will
harder / in therapy / i empty in the telling

/ then the injury / resaturates me with stories /
again / like the glutted flea / no end
 

Jill Khoury (she/her) is a disabled poet and a Western Pennsylvania Writing Project fellow. She lives with OCD, fibromyalgia, PTSD, and congenital blindness. She has taught poetry in high school, university, and enrichment settings. She holds an MFA from The Ohio State University and edits Rogue Agent, a journal of embodied poetry and art. Her poems have appeared in numerous venues, including Copper Nickel, Bone Bouquet, Dream Pop, CALYX, and The Poetry Foundation’s Poem-A-Day. Winner of the Gatewood Prize, her second full-length collection earthwork is available from Switchback Books. Connect with her at jillkhoury.com.

Featured image in this post is, “Lacework at the exhibition PIKANT” by Sally V, 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.

left unsaid

nights on the psych ward, my family lies in bed
with me. even in our mostly estranged state,
i hold onto their sadness, & can’t let go
of mine. they never checked in but i can never
check out. all over the unit the halls go dark,
but sleep only comes through chemicals
the way wastewater percolates a leach field.
as i wait for the relief of unawakeness
in the bed i’ve been assigned,
the nurse’s station shines like a beacon.
yet nothing good is there. unless you count the dulling
of an ache that returns & returns. they’ve got plenty of that—
in many colors & shapes—but when they hand you
the little paper cups where your dreams grow, know
you are swallowing more than you bargained for.

tossing & turning on the vinyl-wrapped mattress, waiting
for my mind to eclipse itself, i remember my outside life.
that three-day weekend my brothers visited me,
their friend’s disappearance & probable suicide hanging
in the air. suddenly i’m back with them in that present.
& nothing is past or tense. we joke wildly about our crazy
family; everything painful is up for grabs—
clay pigeons tossed like targets. the three of us trying
to outdo one another, our sharp tongues like knives
being honed on each other’s whetting stones.
i laugh ’til i almost pee.

but the friend still hovers.
it’s the thing we don’t say to one another.
it’s the only thing we talk about.

that whole weekend, far too much of me is left
unsaid. parts that need to be heard & held.
my struggles stay as dark as these hallways.
when no questions are asked,
you’re still left with an answer.

      ~                               ~                                ~

days on the psych ward, there’s plenty to say:
mornings when they make us rate our potential for self-harm,
the too-lean teen with shaved head & bandaged wrists
insists she has no safety number: Jesus is my safety net.
or the middle-aged scraggly-beard who needs to recite
every Rush concert he’s ever seen each time they table us
for lunch. or art room afternoons, the young man with an old soul
lets slip with a timid grin he believes Appalachian Spring
to be the cause of & solution to all his problems.
i envy them their delusions, the luxury of denial.

all of us far too aware how our brains can’t
handle what got put there. & how there’s too much
to say about that. but i speak very little,
even in group. i see no point
in playing catch when i know no one
will get the balls i toss.

with the TV blaring at the blank stares in the day room, i’m sifted
through the remains of that weekend with my brothers.
& i realize then, years after i should have known this
as clearly as my grandmother’s wrinkles
are invading the back of my hands,
my brothers & me—
we don’t bleed the same way.
 

Pattern of Barely

I forgot where I’d put the ocean.
And all the languages it spoke. Stuck
in a pattern of barely. Eating and sleeping
became daily mountains I had to.
Climb. Backwards.
In the rain.
On my knees.

I’d wanted to carve a boundary,
using a river as a guide. At that point,
the dog was with me. Now I know
what I thought I knew
I never did. Would need to repeat
for the foreseeable future.
It’d be a long time before

any kind of understanding could leave
its teeth in me. Too many nights,
moon muffled by clouds.
Too many weeks, prone
to the couch. Foreverly stale
as a blank page, writing another
etiolated letter to someday.

I’d wanted to grow an ability
to be soft again, to unfetter
my breath, stop waiting
for the next awful uphill thing.
Later I quit what was left
of the job, leaving me even more
poor again. An archetype of scant.

What engines the darkness
fell down my throat. Too often
my stomach masquerades
as a parking lot. Too chronic
for words. Which
medicine? What
medicine?

Inside my skull
a wolf keeps howling.
I want to let her go.

Anne Rankin’s poems have appeared in The Healing Muse, The Poeming Pigeon, The Awakenings Review, Hole in the Head Review, Passager, Scapegoat Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, Whale Road Review, Kelp Journal, Abandoned Mine, Does It Have Pockets?, kerning, The Bluebird Word, Boomer Lit Magazine, Rattle, and Maine Public Radio’s Poems from Here. Her poem “Dear Acadia National Park” will appear in the forthcoming anthology, The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders. Her essays have appeared in The Columbus Dispatch, The Mount Desert Islander, and The Washington Post (for “Life Is Short Autobiography as Haiku”); and she has a short story forthcoming in The Main Street Rag.

Featured image in this post is, “Moon and clouds over Goulburn” by CephasOz, 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.

I wake up with you not beside me

I wake up with you not beside me
but in me in different parts of me

elbows knee neck the middle rib
on my right side you have the run

of the place I can’t stop you
can’t predict from one morning

to this morning where you will be
or how long you will stay like

an unwelcome guest with its own
set of keys and doors too that open

into every part of me this thing
which is supposed to be my home

the one place where I can rest and be
alone at peace sometimes I swear

I feel like the place is yours and
I am just the ghost that haunts

this house all the time a ghost
without form or substance that feels

too much and only one terrible thing
which is you which is I won’t

name you if I do I am afraid
I am afraid you will never leave

Nathaniel Lachenmeyer is an award-winning disabled author of books for children and adults. His first book, The Outsider, which takes as its subject his late father’s struggles with schizophrenia and homelessness, was published by Broadway Books. His most recent book, an all-ages graphic novel called The Singing Rock & Other Brand-New Fairy Tales, was published by First Second/Macmillan. Nathaniel has forthcoming/recently published poems, stories and essays with X-R A-Y, Iron Horse, North Dakota Quarterly, Citron Review, Reed Magazine, Potomac Review, Epiphany, Permafrost, Berkeley Poetry Review, About Place Journal, and DIAGRAM. Nathaniel lives outside Atlanta with his family. www.NathanielLachenmeyer.com.

Featured image in this post is, “Fröndenberg 20170604 12” by Enyavar, licensed creative commons via Wikimedia Commons.