Breath & Shadow
Spring 2018 - Vol. 15, Issue 2
"Schizolove"
written by
Jennifer (Eisenhauer) Richardson
You sit among the scratches on the leather chair reading philosophy, meditating on the gap between memory and anticipation, speaking about difference and the touch of yesterday.
Thoughts turn as questions linger, a pitchfork rolling the hay to prevent fire.
I wear a path in the kitchen, looping a five-step circle, a bag of chips beneath my arm, crumbs scattering across the barrier that separates the real from fiction.
My perceptions haunt, chimeras in the movement of light and shadow, snaking their way into the present.
I hear a sounding alarm, where once you bent on one knee and the salt water quenched the dry soil, the breath of your lips on my forehead.
You ask, have you taken your pills?
Jennifer (Eisenhauer) Richardson is an Associate Professor in Arts Administration, Education, and Policy and an affiliated faculty member with the Disability Studies Program at The Ohio State University. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Disability Studies Quarterly, Wordgathering, Connotations Press, and Visual Culture and Gender. Her 2013 essay appearing in South Loop Review was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her academic writing, appearing in multiple journals, focuses on representations of mental disability.