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 eighth issue features an archival cover photograph that offers a glimpse into turn-of-the-century nursing. The issue was also home to a story by Amy Hempel, two poems by Floyd Skloot, and an essay by the late William Bradley, who movingly wove in description of his cancer treatment with his love of soap operas.
From the Foreword
“One of the most pleasurable tasks of editing a literary journal is assigning the order of the writings in a particular issue. After months of hard work by all of the reviewers and editors—culling the selections, editing the pieces, working with the authors, copy editing, proofreading, formatting—there is the final step: deciding the order of placement. For this issue, I spread out the 36 poems, stories, and essays on the brown vinyl examination table in my clinic office at Bellevue, pulling out the footrest to accommodate extra pages. It is a heady experience to be surrounded by such richness of literature; as with the Viennese dessert tables at fancy weddings, it is hard to know where to begin….”
– Danielle Ofri, Editor-in-Chief
Read Highlights from Issue 8
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!
His Own Time
by John Thompson
There’s something about this waitress that keeps me coming back here. Part of the draw is obvious: it’s her hair. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s braided into a ponytail that hangs like an auburn rope along her back. I’m hoping to get up the nerve to ask her out. She wipes a table, straightens up, and whips the braid of hair over her shoulder. From where I sit, it appears to come dangerously close to the blades of the ceiling fan. It’s an illusion. I know that. Even so, an image ambushes me, her hair snarled in the blades and her body yanked off the floor, her pretty legs flopping as she hangs from the makeshift gallows. I turn back to the bar to try to clear my head.
I did a little time once. It wasn’t a long bit, but that doesn’t matter much. Time is time. One day a new guy on the block, Lenny, decides he can’t take it anymore. Some men are playing cards, and some are walking in circles around the perimeter of the cellblock. You’d be surprised how much time you can kill walking in circles. Most guys walk with somebody. I think it’s so they don’t look crazy. You hear guys say how they walked with so and so for seven years at some joint or another. That’s what “walking with” means. And there’s a certain stride and pace. It’s not for exercise; it’s to kill time.
The Absolute Worst Thing
by Seth Carey
I have bulbar onset ALS, whose symptoms include uncontrollable outbursts of laughter and weeping, sometimes both at once. Fortunately for me, most of my outbursts have been in the more socially acceptable form of laughter. The slightest humorous thought, or the dreaded heart-tug of a Spielberg moment, so popular in phone commercials, and I wave goodbye to self-composure. It makes it tough to act macho. It’s not as bad as it was initially but I still cry in my oatmeal most mornings.
I miss being able to do everything I used to do. I thought I understood what I’d miss and could sort of stockpile experiences to keep from missing them too much. It worked better with some things than with others.
Lithium and the Absence of Desire
by Virginia Chase Sutton
It is not advertised on the pill bottle, merely mentioned
in the product description from the drug store.
You have no idea what you are giving away.
Winter’s amnesia is coming. At first it seems impossible
because you live so fully in mossy, rainy lakes. You
have watched pelicans sail over a mirrored surface
just above and just below the water. It is so easy
to shudder beneath a sun as it burns rock to fire over
the island’s bumpy landscape. So you drift all the way in,
dozing in light and soaked color…..
Newborn Nursery, Bellevue Hospital, c. 1915
Until the middle of the twentieth century, women with resources gave birth at home, with a personal physician or midwife on hand. It was only the indigents and immigrants who went to the hospital to have their babies. Bellevue’s Emergency Pavilion was established in 1877 by the Nursing Schools Board of Managers for “women taken in labor on the streets.”
The cover photo shows student nurses caring for babies in their bassinets. The students were advised by the Board of Managers to watch the babies carefully when they were distributed to their mothers at feeding time since there was a high incidence of infanticide. The Emergency Pavilion closed in 1935. New licensing laws and the emerging field of obstetrics for doctors heated up the politics of childbirth, and Bellevue’s School of Midwifery closed its doors that same year.
(Photo courtesy of Bellevue Hospital Archives)