The past few days have been strange. Me, in bed, waiting for the room to spin a little less violently so I can try to get to the shower slowly enough to not make myself sick, because if I can manage that, I can go to work. If I can go to work, I might make enough to maybe pay my part of my “good” insurance’s emergency room copay.
It’s been a while since I saw my office. Put it on my tab, I guess.
Managing a decades-old chronic illness has conditioned me to accept, mostly without question, the disappointment that comes with a sudden return of mystery symptoms after a long stretch of good health, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
I’ve had two calls recently that focused, in part, on my writing process. The first was…well. It certainly happened. I remembered why I don’t try to discuss writing without notes. Most of the time I am bad at talking. I’m fine with that! Usually! More reason not to do it. Deeply embarrassing to stumble through a simple conversation with a relative stranger, though.
I know my side of the conversation by heart: I started taking writing seriously when my 9th grade English teacher humiliated me in front of the entire class when I dared to ask if I had to go on a field trip, because children who don’t go on field trips will never graduate or go to college or succeed at anything; I revise on paper; any “research” I do is wildly disorganized and ultimately kind of useless; my biggest fear when writing about West Virginia is that I’ll accidentally reinforce the belief that we’re all illiterate hillbillies.
That’s the whole story. What came out of my mouth? Who knows!
But then I got to talk about new poems. New poems about illness. And because I was having that conversation while stuck in bed with a pile of messy drafts in front of me, I managed it remarkably well (for me).
All this to say that every once in a while it becomes plainly obvious that I’m a medical trauma poet before I’m a place poet. If I had to guess, I’d say there are more readers for pharmacy lines and waiting rooms than there are for dead deer and moonlit dam fishing.
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Some poems I’ve enjoyed recently:
– “Salt” by Jacob Sheetz-Willard
– “Elegy for My Ninth Grade Natural Science Project” by Sarah Brockhaus
– “The Hairstylist Asks What We’re Doing Today” by Megan Williams