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Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of, and finding treatments for, complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia, long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.
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Blog entries by Merry
from Wild: An Elemental Journey
by Jay Griffiths
. . . Rasmussen relates a shaman, Igjugarjuk, telling him "True wisdom is only to be found far away from people, out in the great solitude, and it is not found in play but only through suffering. Solitude and suffering open the human mind...
White Towels
by Richard Jones
I have been studying the difference
between solitude and loneliness,
telling the story of my life
to the clean white towels taken warm from the dryer
as though they were my children
asleep in my arms.
This poem by Richard Jones (American, born 1953)...
Safe Love
by Lydia Davis
She was in love with her son's pediatrician. Alone out in the country -- could anyone blame her.
There was an element of grand passion in this love. It was also a safe thing. The man was on the other side of a barrier. Between him and her: the child on the...
Dim Lady
by Harryette Mullen
My honeybunch's peepers are nothing like neon. Today's special at Red Lobster is redder than her kisser. If Liquid Paper is white, her racks are institutional beige. If her mop were Slinkys, dishwater Slinkys would grow on her noggin. I have seen...
Sixteen
by Sandor Marai
The light askance that blazed up in your eyes
The fog that cloaked my eyes and kept them shut
The glove through which your pulse would dip and rise
The lust that tied my body in a knot
The minute that escaped us with shrill cries
The life without you that is...
Sonnet for a Tango in the Twilight
by Jorge Luis Borges
Who was it said it all in a homegrown tango
Whose drawn-out, lovely sweetness made me pause
Under some unassuming little balconies
In that leafy neighborhood that isn't even yours?
All I know is that in its sorrow I saw a...
Robert Sat
by Tom Matthews
The congregation was scandalized
When Robert sat in his pew and read a paperback
My mother said afterwards
"If he wasn't interested why did he come"
And I marvelled at her
For she never thought to apply the criterion to me
And I marvelled at Robert...
Ah, February. I should, like Target, devote myself this month to Eros. Although at Target perhaps every day is Valentine's Day: the bull's eye, the pit bull, the red, red, red.
Here are two works that appeared in a love and marriage issue of Quick Fiction a few years ago. It's a print...
Mortal Poem
by Dean Young
I do not understand why I love you.
The mustard in your hair? Your breasts
like shiny battleships, your thought control?
Reasons seem so insufficient, reason itself
seems insufficient. The sea rushes up
to the beach of no reason, inveigling
chimes of no...
Emmanuelle asked if "From My Commonplace Book" is a collection of writings I like, and the answer is yes.
A few years ago, I was given a beautiful leather-bound journal, and I decided to write in it passages I liked from books I'd borrowed from the public library.
Recently I decided to...
excerpts: Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir
by Sarah Manguso
My mornings were occupied by bathing, eating, drinking a protein drink, having my central line dressed and flushed by the visiting nurse, and exercising pathetically little with the visiting physical therapist. After the fourth or...
The first poem is by Lee Ann Brown. Since the title functions as the first word in the poem, I decided not to separate it from the poem with the author's name.
Words
weren't enough for her.
She often made
high cat cries
and danced hard
on the blue carpet.
Autobiographia...
Here are two light-hearted poems in honor of Martlet's newborn cousin, Liberty Rose, who has struggled in her first days with life-threatening illness. Martlet now reports that little Libby is doing much better.
Acurracy
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Lyda Rose walked through our front door and...
The Festival
by Miroslav Holub
At the festival of patients
with all the known diseases
the crutch choir sings
for the pacemakers.
The double astigmatic landscape
gratefully swallows the murmurs
of the mitral valve.
In the candlelit college hall
corticosteroids anoint psoriases...
Diagnoses
by Miroslav Holub
Measles provoke
the onset of evening, like heavy felt.
Cavities in teeth
open rocks.
Smallpox pits
give contours to the map.
Radiation diseases
show us our place in the cosmos.
Liver inflammations heighten
Fragonard's sensitivity to...
In the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was lined up by the fire with the old people. I was just there trying to get used to my new existence as a doorstop. And as I waited, before me those loved ones of the older generation toppled over one after the other. These, my elder...
I lie quiet in my bed.
Nativity in there,
little hard heads butted up
of the Divine
and his folks;
shepherds' hooks,
crowns of the kings;
poke of a hoof and a stick and straw
and roof peak;
and too many points
of a terrible star.