Breath & Shadow
April 2026 - Vol. 23, Issue 2
mythic
written by
Liv Zušya Grace
crip bedtime stories
are waketime stories too.
that liminal existence
where bedspace is
the always space...
what if i read you a story
of crip vengeance instead,
where you pretend i am turning pages,
and i teach you
that these rheumatic hands
have turned to knives.
let me write a death gospel for these bodies
and i'll teach you a spell for how to walk safe
with a cane for the first time.
this may look like a sick bed,
but this is where i tell you i love you.
it is where i give birth to you
while you sleep—
a death doula
for your night terrors.
my cheeks buried in your hair,
my breath buried in your mouth,
as your whole face
turns silhouette in electric lilac
from the plant light
across the room.
this is a sick bed
which is to say it is a majesty,
an absolute kingdom—
it is a home.
Liv Zušya Grace (they/them) is a queer, trans, and disabled writer whose work is born out of lived experience rather than a formal writing education who used to live on the other coast and now lives on this coast, seemingly perpetually moving from one house to the next with their dog, Karl Barx and about 100 houseplants. Grace’s work refuses the sanitized narratives often demanded of trauma survivors and chronically ill people and asks what it means to grieve a life while still living it, to love fiercely while dying slowly, and to find beauty not despite suffering but woven inextricably within it. Their work has been featured in 8 Poems, Caper Literary Journal, INK & NEBULA, Bone & Ink Press, Best Buds Journal, Protean Magazine, Elderly Magazine, and in two chapbooks, Driveway to Nowhere (Radical Paper Press, 2019) and Mother Darling I Keep My Body Buried In Your Drawers (SFSU Poetry Center, 2021).