Half-life
Veronica Tucker
The carbon in the bone
does not know it was a man.
It has been grass, it has been
the slow lung of a forest,
it will be grass again.
I learned this in a lecture hall
in October, the professor’s voice
going on about decay rates,
predictable and clean,
while outside the maples
were doing what they always do:
dropping what they no longer need.
Now I stand over another body
and think about the nitrogen,
the phosphorus, the calcium
that will go on without him.
The chart says time of death.
The body says: I am mid-sentence.
I have not finished
what I was becoming.
Dr. Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician who practices in rural New Hampshire. Her clinical work sits at the intersection of acute care and the opioid crisis, and it is from this vantage point, witness without resolution, that she writes. Her poetry has appeared in ONE ART, The Berlin Literary Review, Rust & Moth, and others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut chapbook, The House as Witness, is forthcoming from Quillkeepers Press. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, three children, and two dogs. Find her at http://www.veronicatuckerwrites.com and on Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites.
Echocardiogram
Claire Sargenti
I saw my heart
dressed in choir robes
raising her hands in praise
and a syncopated clap-clap
with all the fervor of a gospel singer
accompanied by the sound
of seventy-eight organs
and all their revere
told me that every moment I’m alive
is a celebration
not to be missed
Claire Christine Sargenti Pi’kssii Aakii is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and author. Her work has been seen at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, as well as in galleries, theaters, digital spaces, and print publications throughout America and Europe. Her work has raised funds for various charities and nonprofits including The Nature Conservancy, Sexual Trauma Awareness and Response, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, and Doctors Without Borders.
Technician
Troy Schoultz
She said she’d stay high
twenty-four seven
if she could,
puffs on God’s best medicine
parked in a cemetery
not far from her home.
Those are the times she calls me
in her la-la-la voice,
asks me to whisper her name.
She was the only one to notice me
breaking down in the dialysis chair,
the only one to tell me
that none of it was fair.
She draws hearts, arrows
and firework confetti
on the white paper smock
that protects her
from my stray, toxic blood.
Troy Schoultz is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee who has taught at the University of Wisconsin campuses in Marshfield, Fox Cities, and Oshkosh. He is also an analog collage artist, and hosts Mr. Troy’s Lo-Fi Motel Radio Hour on Oshkosh 101.9 FM. He currently resides in Oshkosh, WI. He can be reached at troy.schoultz@gmail.com.
Angina
Joel Solonche
It is a hand on the heart,
a greeting.
It is mortality grinning,
dumbly, with its big,
hearty hand on the heart,
mortality in person,
squeezing the heart
with its big, hot hand.
And then it becomes
remembering,
the heart remembering
painful experiences
from its infancy,
its childhood and its youth,
separations in the dark,
nightmares of falling
and chases through forests,
unrequited love for heroines
of books and movie stars,
an ache in the shape
of a hand holding such
a heavy heart heart-level
and too long to bear.
It is Latin for torture.
Nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, twice for the National Book Award and three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 50 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
Senescence
Laura McCullough
Cells cease to multiply, but do not die.
Not exactly aging, not decay; it happens
even in embryos, pauses scripted in growth,
neither good nor bad, but necessary. Yet
when we speak of ourselves, we think,
wrinkles, visible receipts of time, signs
not only of senescence, but, sometimes,
sapience. If sentience is simple awareness,
a pulse of perception, even ants have it; we
hope sapience is deeper, closer to wisdom
coming after long thinking, the knowings
evolving, the way light or gas ripens fruit,
the well-becomingness only suffering, then
surviving—& of then of facing even that
limit to our biology—allows us to grow.
Laura McCullough is an award-winning poet and Professor of English with a doctorate in Medical Humanities. Her research centers on the nexus between narrative and trauma theories and the vital role of story in healing intergenerational and personal trauma. Her forthcoming collection, The Resurrection Jar, delves into themes of grief, caregiving, and renewal. She has won three NJ State Arts Council Fellowships, been a Dodge Poet, and has had poems and essays appear widely. Most recently, her bonsai practice has influenced the theme of nature and our relationship with the non-human world in her work. http://www.lmccullough.org
On Adult Physical Therapy Day at the Children’s Hospital
Hugh Findlay
I thrash around the pool like an old blind seal
first this way then that, a few walking laps,
Ai Chi, stretch/flex/float/kick,
repeat 10 times each leg and rest.
Two months in, I get bold and ask the woman
I see on Mondays how she’s doing.
Fibro…just maintaining, she monotones and
looks at me with squinty manatee-like eyes—
deep orbs punched into the skull, like God’s afterthought.
I shower in my wheelchair, a bit more agile each week
and find new blobs of flab above my groin.
Sucks to be me, I mutter to myself.
Dry off, avoid the mirror,
pop a Vicodin for the ride home.
Parents and patients line the hall,
seated in chairs outside doctors’ offices.
At eye-level, I roll slowly past a Hispanic mother and
her two young daughters, twins probably,
both stunted/twisted/squeezed into wheelchairs,
nestled like underdeveloped embryos.
Pobrecitas!
They glance my way and giggle to each other—
a private joke most likely, somehow at my expense.
I don’t care, pleased by their humor.
The mother sees me: Buenos dias señor.
Vaya con Dios, mama.
I spy dirt on the floor in the corners
(the handicap parking spot for filth).
Half-way up the walls, scrape marks from bumping gurneys.
A cool breeze from an open door streams round my knees.
My eyes burn from a janitor’s mop the next hallway over.
I roll on, when suddenly, so sweetly,
a small girl, maybe 3 years old,
strapped into an aluminum walker,
starts up at her mother’s call to see the doctor.
With a monstrously gorgeous smile,
hair in uneven pigtails,
bony legs pointing wrong directions,
she flings herself crab-like down the hall
and in a fraction of a second,
as she passes me,
her huge unblinking eyes meet mine
and say without a word:
Mister stranger,
this is the happiest day of my life
and I am not afraid.
I roll across the threshold
of the exit door,
sunlight blinding me,
waiting to see.
Hugh Findlay’s writing and photography have been published worldwide. In addition to many awards, his nominations include a Pushcart Prize for poetry 2020, Best of the Net for poetry 2025, Best Microfiction 2024, and Best of the Net for photography 2024. IG: @hughmanfindlay http://www.hughmanfindlay.com
Veterans Affairs Primary Care Provider
Jean Liew
He tells me:
With my work, I can only do so much.
My time is not mine, but I’m trying.
I trust you, Doc, but if I can’t work,
how can I provide for my kids? I have two;
the youngest won’t remember me
if I die.
I tell him:
Let’s try this small tweak,
let’s get you admitted,
maybe only a few nights.
And let me tie your little girl’s shoe,
it’s come undone.
I’ll be back tomorrow.
He tells me:
I’m taking the meds, my heart’s okay.
The foods you said are bad, I don’t eat them
anymore, and you know you remind me
of someone else where I worked before,
when I was still working. You’re an angel
sent to help me.
I tell them:
The patient you admitted
during long call, I know him well.
Here’s what works best:
I know he trusts me.
Call me if anything changes.
I’ll check back in two days.
He told me:
I check my sugars, and they’re always high.
My money runs out, end of the month.
I don’t have enough, and the food pantry
just has bread and peanut butter.
It’s just me, you know, and my cat.
We’re cold but, Doc,
call me next week?
I’m telling you:
We did so much on so little:
not much reserve, so little time.
When I got the white card in my box,
when I called too late, myself out of breath,
I cried like I lost my own.
How can you deny the work we did then?
Jean Liew is a rheumatologist and clinical researcher at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center.
Is it?
Arno Bohlmeijer
A deliberate pinch of wind
in hidden spots of my skin?
Or the fingertip of a gnome
full of sympathy, insecure
about the state of my mind
since the body is wayward,
breaking, crying shamelessly.
Maybe it’s an ant, complaining
about my situation: right beside
its frantic plan for a building site.
I’m no enemy, but I can surrender.
Go on then, be a gentle red herring,
a prickly morphine shot or narcotic:
let the little feet kill me quickly, softly.
Arno Bohlmeijer is a poet and novelist, winner of a Pen America Grant, published in six countries by US: Houghton Mifflin. His novel Narrowly (2025) is about rare solidarity and integration after illness. http://www.arnobohlmeijer.com
Revisionary Arts 