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
Issue 22 features winners of our annual contest. The BLR Prizes for this issue were selected by judges Francine Prose, Cornelius Eady, and Susan Orlean.
With diverse stories and voices, the pieces in this issue take us far and wide. From the thoughts of a physical therapist caring for a war veteran to an intense dinner-time conversation between two psychotherapists, these pieces offer a glimpse into experiences and lives we might otherwise never know.
From the Foreword
“I kept them all. The poems, I mean.”
So writes Eleonora Luongo in her poem “Conversation with a Dead Poet,” appearing in this issue of the Bellevue Literary Review. I ponder over these lines as I write this introduction to my last issue as Poetry Editor. Since 2004, I have read thousands of poems, thousands of little gems waiting to be unearthed. I have had the pleasure of bringing some of them to the page, but the inevitable, difficult job of turning so many away. But indeed, in some way, I have “kept them all.”
The Bellevue Literary Review‘s theme of “illness, health, and healing” calls to many people who are in the medical profession and to those living with illness. When reading poems for the BLR, I am struck by the unique voices and perspectives, the lyrical capturings, the humor, and the words selected as carefully as each stone is selected for the building of a house.
Whether the poem makes us laugh or cry, or clutch the paper to our hearts, it has to move us to another place, a new reality, a new connection so that even when you are washing the dishes or turning the keys to your door, you are thinking of that poem, that line.
– Corie Feiner, past Poetry Editor
Read Highlights from Issue 22
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!
Terminal Device
Honorable Mention in BLR’s Goldenberg Prize for Fiction
by Jennifer Lee
When I have a patient in physical therapy, a brief and sudden intimacy forms. Kelly Graham is coming in five days a week, and I’m seeing more of her than any other person I know. Her knee will heal, and then our relationship will end. The only question is how long it will take.
This girl is going to get back on her feet again. She’s determined, sets goals; she is thinking of training for the Washington, D.C. Marine Corps Marathon in October. Her father, Mike, brings her in every day. He could use some therapy on his knees too, the way he shuffles around. But he isn’t paying any attention except to Kelly. “How’s she doing?” he asks. He asks me that every time.
I can tell she is all he has. “She’s amazing,” I tell him. It’s what he needs to hear, but it’s also the truth. I’ve never seen anyone try so hard. It puts me to shame. And I vow, in any way that counts, to be more like her.
Batteries in Our Times
by Dwaine Rieves
It’s a new month and I’m home on a hot Mississippi morning, here once more to try to help my father. He’s eager and his stomach’s growling; I pull his pick-up close to the back door so he can shuffle directly from the air-conditioned house to the air-conditioned cab. I turn the vents toward his face as he closes the truck door and adjusts his portable oxygen to one liter per minute. He uses two in the house but one liter will work, he says. I imagine his other make-do situations—duct tape on a leaky watering trough, a single electric wire before the gaping hole in the barbed wire fence.
The farm was always a sore spot in our family, mainly because my father seemed to value hay balers and breeder bulls over looming grocery bills and leaking toilets. Back then, my mother’s suppertime reality-check seemed indisputable to everyone around the table except the man at the head. Invariably, a new drill press or tractor tire trumped a balanced bank account. Still, we got by.
Strawberries in Snow
by Anya Silver
Belief comes too easily to the ill.
Miracles fall from their lips like gems,
are worn like secret amulets. A woman,
I’m told, brushed her steps of snow
and found the very thing she craved
to eat, strawberries fresh as summer,
dimpled sweet and red beneath the rime.
Issue 22: The Cover
Student nurses at Bellevue Hospital, circa 1890
From its founding in 1736, Bellevue utilized recruits from its penitentiary to do the jobs of nurses, housekeepers, and attendants. Unsurprisingly, the quality of nursing care and cleanliness was abysmal. When Louisa Lee Schuyler led an inspection for the State Board of Charities in 1872, her committee was horrified by the conditions. The Training School for Nurses at Bellevue Hospital opened in 1873, the first school in the United States to be run according to Florence Nightingale’s nursing principles.
Patient care rapidly improved, and Bellevue’s nursing school became a model for nursing training. The iconic nursing uniform shown on the cover was designed by Euphemia Van Rensselaer and adopted in 1878. This photo was taken in the surgical operating theater. Nurses were not initially allowed in the theater, but fought (successfully) to assist in surgery. The white caps were designed with hygiene in mind, to keep stray hairs away from the nurses’ work. The Bellevue nursing pin of a crane (symbolizing vigilance) surrounded by poppies (symbolizing relief from suffering) was designed by Tiffany & Co.
The last nurse to wear the traditional white uniform, white shoes, cap, and pin was Rita LaCouture, who worked in Bellevue until her death in 1995. Those of us who were privileged to work with her remember her as a dynamo, and a special link to nursing history. (And she didn’t mind when we affectionately referred to the coffee filter on her head…)
Watch our Spring Reading
Even if you missed our recent Spring Reading live, you won’t want to miss watching it in our newly released video! This was a truly special event, full of stunning poems, stories, and essays from authors in our new issue, including the winners of the 2026 BLR Prizes.
Above: Dara Laine reads her prizewinning poem, “Telling the Bees,” at the event.