String Theory

by Venita Blackburn

I did not speak until I was six years old. My laugh was pretty as new chalk, I’ve been told, and I attempted time travel at age twenty. No one ever told me “you’re not like most girls.” Some things I learned as I went along.

It was the first week of fall classes my sophomore year when I met Mariko and her boyfriend Alkie. I sat, as usual, between two empty chairs in the front row of the room. “Welcome again to Quantum Physics,” said the professor, a mid-twenties tenure-track phenom not yet jaded by the academic institution frequently referred to as “the tar pit.” His slack-jawed yet earnest response to every less than intelligent question endeared him to his students. 

Illness as Muse

by Rafael Campo

To write explicitly about one’s own illnesses risks an even worse self-indulgence—bunion surgery and hemorrhoids, no matter how distressing to the otherwise healthy poet, simply cannot make for scintillating verse. On the other hand, to write about another’s suffering can seem entirely presumptuous, as if it were somehow possible to re-create on the expanse of the clean, neat white page the image an anorexic teenager sees of herself in her bathroom mirror that leads her to induce vomiting—or worse, that somehow, in the earnest imaginative quest for that universal balm that heals, anorexia becomes indistinguishable from anemia, AIDS and ALS and AML interchangeable.

While it’s true that the screams of pain coming from the room in the ER where a woman is losing her baby are no more or less heart-wrenching than those from the woman in the next room who is withdrawing from heroin, the specific details of each story must matter just as much as the ultimately indescribable agony they share. “We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others,” declared Virginia Woolf, in her indelibly humane essay “On Being Ill”; though she brilliantly defended the notion of illness as a motive for writing, she too was forced to consider our myriad limitations as our own bodies’ reporters. Yet we must rely on these faulty accounts, perhaps taking additional solace in their imperfections, because to do without them would be injurious to the soul, and to not forgive them would leave us utterly hopeless.

Eye Examined

by Cortney Davis

In the darkened room, vision dims.
The doctor leans close, looks eye to eye;
his light invades my pupil’s rim.

His light moves left and right as he directs
his beam across my retina. Vessels
float like crimson ribbons, thin and bright.