Poetry

Animal_Human_Tree_PSM13Poetry-Lisa_Licht-Final

Poetry Issue #13: Animals & Health July 24th, 2023 Animal, Human, Tree by Lisa Romano Licht Animal, Human, Tree He hasn’t walked all week. Tonight four little legs agree, march the lawn and looming street At the corner his face surveys the evening’s offering. Sniffs the potpourri of animal, human, tree Behind our neighbor’s house the sun descends, dusts gold onto his honeyed fur, failing eyes His gaze meets mine—gentle surprise—as if to say: This is all good, it’s very good. Then things I had stopped seeing, shine: his creature-kind expression, regal stance, twilight’s water-colored page, the leaving leaves that ...

Letter from the Poetry Editor

Poetry Issue #13: Animals & Health July 17th, 2023 Letter from the Poetry Editor: TBD by Steve Granzyk Deepening our Connections I was well into middle age when I encountered poet Richard Wilbur’s “Advice to a Prophet.” In that remarkably imagined poem, the speaker provides a scene of our planet devastated and destroyed by human ignorance and irrationality, a poetic imagining of a nuclear winter. He longs for a modern version of a biblical prophet who ...

Letter from the Poetry Editor

Poetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Letter from the Poetry Editor: Diagnosis: Bravely Finding A Path Forward by Steve Granzyk ust as all of us eventually become patients, so too do the ways we experience diagnosis share common elements. The poets here have conjured a variety of figures representing how we may proceed from experiencing symptoms, to getting diagnosed, to struggling with various maladies—whether temporary or permanently life altering. Here you will find images of ...

Three Poems PSM 12 Poetry – Linda Lamenza

Poetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Three Poems by Linda Lamenza Diagnosis: Wrecked The curse is the mark, like Alpine Swiss, across my fifth metatarsal. Sometimes it’s a map, or Monet’s Water Lilies in deep reds and pinks, wrecked by someone’s SUV, a ghoulish work of art by Saturday’s driver. Linda Lamenza reads “Diagnosis: Wrecked”: Honda Pilot Truth is the purple swollen disaster of my foot, where her tire wrecked me in the Mobil parking lot. My right elbow a shattered bone I can no longer lean on. Now, I’m a part of ...

Magnetic North PSM 12 Poetry – Dagne Forrest

Poetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Magnetic North by Dagne Forrest Magnetic North And so it may start here, in the doctor's office, in front of a no longer blank page, or at home when I find myself unmoored from a body whose borders I can’t define. The edges of unknowing begin to recede like the thickened ice that pulls away from the pond's ragged shore, leaving a dark liquid space unadorned and much too deep though it's just a thin rift. Nothing a late snow couldn't cover like ...

Poetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Poetry Letter from the Poetry Editor: Diagnosis: Bravely Finding A Path Forward by Steve Granzyk Magnetic North | Dagne Forrest Automata, My Apartment (Newly Disabled), ++++Siege (Chronic Pain) | Rebekah Bartlett Exam Rooms are Often Windowless, ++++Grandma's Letters-Just Another Mortal | Amy Haddad Clinical | Mary Birnbaum CVA, Make the Call, Long Hauler | Joe Amaral Kally, Prepare the Poison, Apheresis | Aria Dominguez After the Doctor's Call | Joan Mazza Surfacing, Blood Journey, Anemia | Deborah Meltvedt The Thing Is, ...

Three Poems PSM 12 Poetry – Joe Amaral

Poetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Three Poems by Joe Amaral CVA Cerebrovascular accident: brain bleed in the gears of our human machinery. We detect the obvious signs and symptoms of injury with the acronym BEFAST: Balance, Eyes, Face, Arms, Speech, Time. Asymmetrical hemiplegia, say “squeeze.” Only one side works, the other paralyzed or markedly weak. Word salad, alphabet soup, blurred vision, slurred speech. Ataxia, like trying to say “chisel” in a single syllable . . . impossible. We obtain a blood sugar, an ECG, blood pressure (too high), start an ...

Three Poems PSM 12 Poetry – Rebekah E. Bartlett

Poetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Three Poems by Rebekah E. Bartlett Automata The tapes burn into my skin. The machine drubs back my rhythm. Around me tumble words: Arrhythmia, p-waves, systolic as the doctors’ murmur over my heart’s sudden antics. Strange, how often I begged that heart to break in grief, rage, despair; wondered it could endure such pain to no good end. And now it is breaking, I see it was not mine to command, was never a heart of sighs and words but a clockwork, timebound ...

Clinical PSM 12 Poetry – Mary Birnbaum

Poetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Clinical by Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum Clinical The doctor swans into the examination room in a white capsule of ennui, weary. The patient loosens her paper cover, attempts a smile through the bureaucratic crackle, naked except for the timid white cotton over shopworn breast and middle-aged belly. She points to her thigh: a speck that must be obvious to the dullest ignoramus is merely a dermatofibroma . . . . the doctor’s fingernail scratches a desultory red note on ...

Two Poems PSM 12 Poetry – Amy Haddad

Poetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Two Poems by Amy Haddad Exam Rooms Are Often Windowless When we first arrived hours ago, it was sunny, now pouring. We hear the drum roll of rain on the metal roof, the damp complaints of thunder. We sat in the big waiting room well past my appointed time, then finally felt a lift of hope when we were herded back into this airless box of a room, only to continue the long wait for my pathology ...