Christine Weeber’s first poetry chapbook, Sastrugi, speaks to living at 9,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains, as well as dealing with environmental illness and her mom’s journey through cancer.
Word
We, Tuskegee?
Severe ME/CFS/MCS patient Peggy Munson was hospitalized, near death, after the Ice Storm of December 11, 2008 and ensuing 3-day power outage. She remembers today, one year later.
Golditox: A Fractured Fairy Tale for the Challenged
by Susan M. Silver | The tale of Golditox, a golden gifted girl who finds new meaning in life through her journey with environmental illness.
Leap Frog
The spring I was thirty-three, I paid Johnny the neighbor a quarter for every frog he could catch. The amphibians arrived on my porch in coffee cans, Kermits squiggling, croaking and hopping against the round metal sides.
Masks
“…whenever I’ve donned a mask, for whatever purpose, the transformation in my self has opened up my perceptions with a wide wing span, allowing me to move—even for just an hour—out of the human and into a more primitive realm.”
Short List of Common Pesticides
1. Lindane | When someone found white dwarfs behind my ears | I was deloused with mustard gas | I had a daily headache that was like a single eye
Corkscrewed! Me and My Lyme
Just when I thought there were no other ways to be pathogenically screwed, I have been corkscrewed.
Autumn Equinox
I feel my body letting go of light | drawn to the wisdom of a harvest moon. | I feel it welcome the lengthening night | like a lover in early afternoon.
Channel
In time the fork my life took | as illness changed its course | will wander to the main stream | and there below the long waterfalls | and cataracts I will begin to rush | to the place I was going from the start.
Wild in the Woods:
I am demented. I have been clinically demented for a decade, ever since contracting a virus that attacked my brain in December of 1988. I display dementia’s classic “multiple cognitive deficits that include memory impairment but not impairment of consciousness” and am totally disabled.