For 25 years, Bellevue Literary Review has been publishing stories, essays, and poems that take readers into the shared space where art and medicine meet. Throughout our anniversary year, we’re marking this incredible milestone by inviting you on a journey through the BLR archive, from the beginning through the present.
Join us each week as we curate special highlights — stories, poems, photos, and more — from each of our issues.
About the Issue
BLR‘s seventh issue featured writing by Enid Shomer, Nahid Rachlin, Renee Ashley, Walter Cummins, Paula Bohince, and many other talented writers. The cover is one of our favorites, illustrating the striking quality of natural-light photography and its ability to capture a moment.
From the Foreword
“The Fall 2004 issue of the Bellevue Literary Review chronicles a range of bodily rebellions, the sometimes colorful and often agonizing varieties in which they are manifest, and the challenges of adapting to them…. Illness, loss, disability, and death all are uninvited guests. Each saps a portion of a person, sometimes unforeseen, often insidiously. Meditating too long on these lurking possibilities stirs an existential angst that can paralyze. But at this moment it is worth appreciating all that is not malfunctioning”
– Danielle Ofri, Editor-in-Chief
Read Highlights from Issue 7
Each week, we’ll be highlighting one outstanding story, poem, and essay from the featured issue. We encourage you to explore more from the issue on our website or, better yet, to pick up a copy!
The Plagiarist
by Hollis Seamon
“Why?” Althea leaned toward the splotchy-pale student who sat in her small office chair, his wide khaki thighs overflowing its seat. “You had to know you were doing it. And you had to know that, this time, you’d be kicked out.”
The boy’s face flushed an unhealthy plum and tears began to roll down his cheeks. He kept his eyes focused on his boots—they were leaking slushy, salty water onto Althea’s blue rug. Ever so slowly, he nodded.
Althea flung herself back in her chair. Jesus. The poor slob. The poor stupid kid. She closed her eyes. Her heartbeat was thudding in her ears again—boom, boomedy, boom, boom, boom. Her head made it into a little song, a high whining soprano melody over the imperious bass. Then, her long training forced her to scan it: dactylic, a particularly obnoxious meter.
A Staircase in the Fog
by Robin Fast
Snow began falling at daybreak, and through the darkness of December, it came down with the force of something true. Drifts banked the windowpanes before it let up, hollows in the backyard leveled, and the ridge top above us faded like smoke. When the storm petered out at noon, my home lay steeping in fog—the ground-hugging inversion of smoke and vapor that usually follows snow in this inland valley. East of the Cascade Range, fog is the hair shirt of winter, our lives inside it abraded by caffeine spurts and restless sleep.
Beneath this rag-and-bone sky, the only shadow cast is memory. It was wintertime thirty-five years ago when I learned that family afflictions, like weather, come at you from beyond.
Spring
by Sandra Giedeman
We watch the gardener arc the hose
carelessly washing away the work
of mud sparrows, hornets and wasps.
Nests studded with the white eggs
in the intricate catacombs they constructed
under the eaves of the hotel.
A single red flower sways near our table.
My mother planted a crooked row
of tulips that color
from the corner of our house to the street
when we all still spoke to one another….
Bellevue’s Outpatient Department (OPD) was housed in a massive brick building, erected c.1910. Design of the building was based on the Florence Nightingale Plan, stipulating large windows and high ceilings to maximize fresh air flow to prevent disease. A consequence was abundant natural light, a boon to photographers. The OPD was always busy; signs were in seven languages, reflecting diversity of the patients. Then, as now, children in the OPD were routinely seen by residents on rotation who were supervised by attending physicians. By 1973, all outpatient services were relocated to the new Bellevue Hospital tower. (In 2005 they moved to a new Ambulatory Care Center, which was established in a glass-enclosed atrium built around the historic 1930s building designed by McKim, Mead & White.) The OPD was razed in 1975, and replaced by the garden that now graces the hospital entrance. (Photo courtesy of Bellevue Hospital Archives)