Truth
Anna Catone - { Histories }
Janlori Goldman - { Bachelard's Cabinet } { The Jewish Gauchos of Entre Rios, 1917 }{ One Good Turn }
Elizabeth Howort - { The Sun, That Great Magician }
Sam Abbott - { It Eats You }
Rachel M. Simon - { Seizure } { Title IX }{ Hometown }{ Swish }
Untruth
Rosa C. Li - { Lucky Elephant }
Ken Cormier - { A Day in the Life of a Conversationalist }
Juan Carlos Reyes - { A War for Rigoberto Chismón }
Rachel M. Simon - { After Life }
We Don't Know and They
Won't Tell Us
Rebecca Keith - { Excerpt from Misdirected Postcard, One }
T.M. De Vos - { Leaving Lake Baikal }
Kamilah Aisha Moon - { Going Under } { Don't Move This Dust }{ Burn }{ After Our Daughter's Autism Diagnosis }
| Burn by Kamilah Aisha Moon |
Second degree, how can one be
so sure it's not deeper?
Lean in, doctor, anyone. Smell
all of the charred things.
For weeks I watched
a three inch mark
thrive like a red mold
throughout my starved skin,
missing her. The passion
was wild and bright, a blaze
too hot to die. Her aim wasn't
to keep me warm or safe.
Beware of desire
with nowhere to go.
My body is angry
at my reckless sacrifices.
Slumped in a chair too close
to an electric heater,
I roasted my right thigh
into the surface of Mars
as I escaped this world
and its cruel partings
into sedated dreams.
Instead of freedom
I am here,
in the ER among
other agonies, only curtains apart.
A stranger collided
into me and broke the bubble
that kept harm from spreading.
Nine fluorescent hours
come and gone. I am in bed 23,
patient with weird wound,
an unheld hand. Finally Dr. Jackson
takes it. He must be new,
can't tell if he's sincere or practicing
his bedside manner. Let's take no chances,
he says, ordering tests and tracing
my thigh with meticulous, gloved hands--
unlike the why did you wait so long? team
before midnight, ready to banish me without
a single cream, antibiotic. But then he says,
I have to make a table of you, spreading out
sterile gauze and ointments
across my stomach. A table
and not a woman, just like I became a prop
and not a person anymore.
He had to hurt me
to help me, slough hard to save
the rebounding skin underneath.
This isn't his fault though.
Why did I wait so long?
Punishment is a phoenix that never rises,
lesson seared forever.
