Wednesday, May 30, 2012

The Father Cards

  by R. Welch

When I was 26 years old I started to experience migraine headaches on a daily basis. They began with a head cold and a recurring sinus headache that spiraled in severity and completely derailed my life. I did not immediately seek medical attention. I believed the headaches were related to the cold and expected them to resolve along with it, but this did not happen. Instead they became more and more crippling. I would leave work, day after day, and stagger home where I emptied a tray of ice into a towel, secured the towel to my forehead with a belt, and pressed my forehead into the my living room rug until the ice melted away. Nothing helped. I spent so much time with my hand pressed to my brow, the skin on my forehead cracked and began to bleed. After one particularly horrible siege eased, I had to use half a tube of Clearasil to hide the scratches across my forehead where I had apparently tried to claw the headache from my skull. One afternoon, unable to make it to my apartment, I staggered into the emergency room of Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia and fell into the arms of an ER nurse who held me as I breathed into a paper bag long enough to stop hyperventilating. I was admitted to the hospital for a week while they ran test after test. They thought I might have a brain tumor or an abscessed sinus, but none of their speculations were supported by the test results. I was on 23 different prescriptions and became mildly addicted to Demerol. Finally, after showing up unannounced once too often to writhe on my doctor's examination table; after 6 weeks of daily headaches that had gone from 2 or 3 hours in duration to 14-16 hour epics of excruciating, blinding pain that felt as though something evil was pounding nails into my skull, my doctor said he thought we needed to get a "psychological perspective" on my problem.

Monday, May 7, 2012

Bruise

by JD DeHart

Light blue reminder
Under my toenail
Not to have a temper.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Mrs. Hughes

 by Michelle Kreiner

 
Greet me morning
Shine on me sun
Take the pain of night
 
Move the memories
Mask the images
Muffle the voices
I need rest
 
When he touches another,
do I become unfamiliar
to those who know me?
 
When he lifts her leg
against the doorframe,
do I cease to exist?
 
When he leaves
like air
this signed paper
means nothing.
 
Sleeping babies
belong to no one.
 
Seal the doors
Shut the windows
Start the gas
I need rest
 
Oh, morning
close my suffering,
Oh, sun
beam no hope
 
Sweet aroma
of my silent soliloquy,
please,
lay me down.
I need rest