Nonfiction
I am a child of the Iranian revolution. In 1983, my mother gave birth to me in Evin Prison, one of Iran’s most notorious jails.
Pain made me a precocious student of time, each middle ear infection a new lesson on the uncatchable instant.
I spent a lot of time thinking about blood during my training years—hoping I could get enough of it, wondering which vein would yield the best supply of it, wishing the patients had more of it, calling the blood bank for a bag of it.
Nadia Ghent One afternoon, after my mother had fallen ill for the fourth or fifth…
Television had always been a perfect distraction from our family’s drama and trauma, soothing us more than our Baptist faith.
To be ill is to be displaced—displaced from health, displaced from one’s former self, displaced from the community of the well.
Amy V. Blakemore reads from her prize-wining essay, “The Tapeworm” from BLR Issue 40.