Breath & Shadow

POETRY

LOUIE CREW

Classified
INTERNATIONAL: CHOICE
HISTORIC RESIDENCES going
at a steal. Massive living rooms,
with built-in pipe organs, stained
glass windows, vaulted ceilings,
fonts, excellent reading stands, at
least one high table, with banquet
seating possible, and assorted ce–
lebrity chairs.
Read Louie Crew's poem.

SHORT STORY

KATHLEEN O'CONNOR

Dear One
The deer eats winter vegetation at the periphery of my yard. Occasionally, she flicks her tail, stops, and then stares forward and I could swear she is watching me. I drop my breakfast dishes into the sink to soak and continue staring out the kitchen window in admiration while I finish my coffee.

Ten minutes later, I grab my cane and head outside, wishing for the hundredth time that I owned an attached garage. I'm quiet about backing my car down the drive — just in case she is still enjoying breakfast, though I suspect she has gone.
Read Kathleen O'Connor's short story.

POETRY

MICHAEL LEE JOHNSON

Nikki
Watching doves
peck away,
all day long at
a full bowl
of mixed seeds . . .

Bathroom Visitor
A horsefly
travels the world
of my bathroom.
Stops at the kitty litter box
on occasion for refueling . . .
Read Michael Lee Johnson's poems.

CREATIVE NON–FICTION

RIA STRONG

Tales of a Magic Fairy
What do you see when you look at us? It's all a matter of perception.

My mother thinks I'm her fairy. Her magic fairy. Her memory fairy. Her wonderful can do anything fairy. Bubble wands and fairies. they seem to go together. So maybe my mother's right.
Read Ria Strong's story.

ESSAY

MADELEINE PARISH

The Birthday Party
    We're together for the first time in five years.  Three sisters.  Terry, the oldest, pastes us together with persistence and illusion.  She believes we can be a family, that we are a family.  Julie, the youngest, bites her lower lip and wears a worried brow, even while driving her red Miata with the top down to her job as a South Florida city planner.  And me, in the middle.  I moved to Connecticut almost twenty years ago to cut free from my tangled roots, I thought.  I know that my illness (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) structures my life in a way my family must find limiting, and that my writing aspirations might seem paltry and a little suspect.  So when I return Upstate to the barren terrain on chilly Lake Ontario, where my neuroses and fears were planted, watered, and pruned, I take their suspicions as truth. I feel I've failed.
Read Madeleine Parish's essay.

POETRY

CINDY PRINCE

Basket Full of Memories
Basket of apples
Swinging
As I tag along singing
Following my brother
Sitting on Mother's lap
As I take my first bite
The skin tight
On my teeth . . .
Read Cindy Prince's poem.

POETRY

PETRA KUPPERS

Concrete
My hip hurts. What is it to you?
There is no street that
travels through though you
remember your aunt, or Skipper, the dog.

The street hurts. One step on the grass, skip over
the concrete bit
       relief
in the green middle.
Read Petra Kuppers' poem.

SHORT STORY

DOROTHY BAKER

Canary
It was another couch day for Jesse, reluctant canary in the environmental coal mine of Planet Earth. She and her chemically sensitive friends called themselves canaries, because they believed their illness was a warning about the health effects of chemicals. Like one of the caged canaries that used to warn miners of gas leaks by keeling over, their little feet pointing pathetically skyward, Jesse lay immobile on the couch.
Read Dorothy Baker's short story.

FILM REVIEW

ERIKA JAHNEKE

When Will I Dance Again
Sometimes the only companion Katherine Devoir has is her camera, an unlikely living arrangement for a dancer and performance artist, but Katherine's struggles with environmental illness have turned her life from "privileged and white" to the isolation of government benefits and trying to regain more of her health, knowing that the medical establishment does little to acknowledge her "invisible" condition.
Read Erika Jahneke's film review.

POETRY

KAMILA RINA

Perfect
Only years later you told me. When it could change
nothing. You used the word "perfect".

It was early May several springs ago; we weren't
dating — or so we told ourselves. I invited
you to the opening of my group photography
show, where my bit of wall hosted a set of self–portraits
titled "chronic fatigue girl dreams of flying".
I waited for you for hours outside the bustling gallery . . .
Read Kamila Rina's poem.

BOOK REVIEW

ARDEN ELI HILL

Origami Striptease
Origami Striptease, by acclaimed poet and short story writer Peggy Munson, is a Breath and Shadow reader's wet dream, as the debut novel exemplifies a blend of disability culture and literature. Munson folds descriptions of life with chronic illness, lust, love, queerness, borderlands, abuse, and survival into one impactful read. The protagonist of Origami Striptease is a queer writer who develops "ink poisoning" after her encounter with a complicated villain called The Sludge . . .
Read Arden Eli Hill's book review.

MONOLOGUE

SANDRA DEMPSEY

Air Apparent
Aisling: The air was fine. They said so. The air was positively good. The E.P.A. said they did test after test after test — it was apparent; perfectly all clear, so the air was fine.

And all I did was live in my little half–studio over a guy and his family that runs the bodega downstairs. Half dog–walking, half social assistance — it's all I can do to give the guy rent every month. Not a bad guy, poor, but nice family, cute little kids. He works like a dog and I can't believe people pay me money to walk theirs . . .
Read Sandra Dempsey's monologue.

POETRY

BOB BOSTON

Comes A Push–Cart
There are way too many people writing poetry, and not nearly enough people reading it. It seems to me poets write for the credits. They collect them like rare stamps. Each aiming, I suppose, to be the next Charles Bukowski or Langston Hughes, or Mary Jo Bang.  .  .  or the next Lyn Lyfshin. They all want to be nominated, it seems, for that damn Push–Cart.
Read Bob Boston's poem.

POETRY

LOUIE CREW

A Wafer
A Wafer
      for My Student
Whose Mother Cut the Tubes
      Once the Family
      Had left the ICU of
Tsuen Wan Adventist Hospital
Read Louie Crew's poem.

FICTION

DENISE NOE

Garbage Thoughts
I want to die. I want to kill those selfish, dirty kids. No, Lenore thought as she clocked in to work. She did not feel that way; she did not hate anybody. She certainly did not want to die and be nothing forever, no thing.

Lenore kept her tools in a dark green basket; she had drawn a happy face and a flower on the sides of it. Today was the day to scrub down the shower stalls. She powdered the grayish-white floor of the shower lumpy white with cleanser, and wet the sponge.
Read Denise Noe's story.

POETRY

JOHN THOMAS ALLEN

Chills
moving through
a whistling cascade
of wet leaves,
the teasing wind robs his
legs of security
under grasping
branches missing
only rope…
Read John Thomas Allen's Poem.

ESSAY

ROBERT DODGE

Stigma: You're Going to Like These People
In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prine was publicly condemned and her sentence was to wear a scarlet A for "adulterer" on her breast for as long as she remained in Salem, so that all would know of her deeds. Three hundred years later and half a world away, labeling and ostracism continued. Not in fiction and a rigidly religious society, but the very real world of Singapore. 
Read Robert Dodge's essay.

POETRY

ELIZABETH MARCHITTI

Natalia in a Past Life
Owner of a town house
in suburban New Jersey,
blond, slender,
former physicist, now poet,
she of the intricate metaphor
and lyrical images
Read Elizabeth Marchitti's poem.

MUSIC REVIEW

ERIKA JAHNEKE

Crescendo
If the John Lennon that worked on Rubber Soul could travel to the present, listen to Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Cash and get injured on re-entry, he might have written an album that sounded like "Rollover". Luckily for us, we get it, even without the time machine being invented.
Read Erika Jahneke's review.

POETRY

MARGARET PRICE

Drinking Saltwater

         For Sara

From birth we shared a freakish
gift: we could live on saltwater.
Our tongues would cringe, throats contract,
but when we lacked for fresher prospects
we knew where to lap.  .  .  .
Read Margaret Price's poem.

ESSAY

LAURA TAYLOR

Easing into Sunlight
I'm Southern, which means I'm a natural, slow-talking storyteller. I share my thoughts slowly, as if sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, sipping sweet iced tea with lemon, enjoying the scent of nearby honeysuckle.  .  .  .
Read Laura Taylor's essay.

POETRY

RACHEL WYNNE

If I Could Tell You
If I could tell you, you would know
That every single day of this life of mine
I reach for More and I trust it to come to me —
Utterly trust that it will come.  .  .  .
Read Rachel Wynne's poem.

ESSAY

SHARON WACHSLER

Bringing Down the House
I've been feeling like a failure as a disabled person. I moved into my Beautiful New Home — with its cathedral arch and south–facing floor–to–ceiling windows — and promptly began wrecking it.  .  .  .
Read Sharon Wachsler's essay.

POETRY

LINDA A. CRONIN

What I Don't Know
I don't know why I feel ashamed
when you see me sitting in the wheelchair
for the first time. Why I want to vanish  .  .  .
Read Linda Cronin's poem.

ESSAY

ERIKA JAHNEKE

Response to "What I Don't Know"
I don't know who I am now that I'm no longer "promising" or the crip chick in the front row whose grade messes up the curve. I don't know when I stopped belonging and stopped hoping for a disposition that matched my blonde hair so that I would fit with Phoenix's three hundred days of relentless sunshine.  .  .  .
Read Erika Jahneke's essay.

POETRY

DAVID KOPASKA–MERKEL

She's dead, Jim
did
you
follow
us into
the singing forest  .  .  .
Read David Kopaska–Merkel's poem.

ESSAY

INA MAE BROOKS

Unintentional Deception
I stumbled over a bedroom slipper in 1960 and landed on my left knee with all my weight. When I couldn't straighten my leg, I knew it was serious.  .  .  .
Read Ina Mae Brooks's essay.

POETRY

PAUL KAHN

The Pearl
What is this pearl,
that I have given you
in token of our love?  .  .  .
Read Paul Kahn's poem.