Tag: poetry about illness
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The Transparent Mother
The Transparent Mother began as a refusal to sentimentalize disappearance. I wanted to write a poem where the mother’s vanishing wasn’t metaphor but physical fact—bare feet, bloody toes, a face turned away. The poem inherits her instability without naming it.
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Reclamation
Reclamation began as a meditation on the chalk line—first as a metaphor for confinement, then as a literal aura traced by radiation machines. I wanted to write a poem that didn’t glorify survival but acknowledged its cost: the neuropathy, the pouchitis, the ache where the colon once lived. The poem lives in the tension between…