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Monthly Archives: May 2010
Poetry on Widowhood
How Are You? You weren’t dead a day before someone greeted me Hi, how are you? How can I say My husband collapsed and died yesterday. I was up all night, donated his organs, and walked away for the last … Continue reading
Las Vegas, 1966
It’s the kind of sun that bleaches out everything. Takes all the colors and mutes them into echoes of their former selves. Relentlessly beating down upon whoever dares venture outside. Sunburned peeling skin and never enough liquids to drink, the … Continue reading
After The Earthquake
Sitting in a circle under the thatched roof at the field hospital, the doctors and other volunteers drink coffee from metal mugs. I listen to their earthquake stories as I distribute meat patties and mille feuilles for breakfast, creatures snaking … Continue reading
My English Teacher
Then he walks into the waiting room sits down across the way. How can he be here – I had nothing I could say today, anymore than I did then – my hand beneath those sheets, what it did or … Continue reading
My Jazzman
My jazzman beat it out on the mighty eighty-eights played those riffs tapped his feet bent his head down to the keys felt those sounds on his fingertips. Yeah, he was a hot man on those eighty-eights. But, all too … Continue reading
Buddha
“The dead we can imagine to be anything at all.” Ann Patchett, Bel Canto He sits cross-legged in a tree deep in concentration, the way he would sit on the floor of his room leaning against the bed doing homework, … Continue reading
The Dreaded Question
It happened again like so many times before. I was at my sister’s house, standing at the kitchen counter with her neighbor, someone I had just met. We talked about what a great day this had been in Portland and … Continue reading
Mania
Intoxicated, euphoric. exhilarated, with visions of power without bounds, Paul is like Superman. He climbs, he circles, he races, he floats above reality until paranoia removes all semblance of his sanity. Then he sees demons lurking in alleyways, imaginary Mafioso … Continue reading
From The Other Side
Lying on the operating table, my naked body is covered with a white sheet. I’m startled when the surgeon approaches me, flips up the sheet, grabs the black Sharpie out of his white coat pocket and signs his name in … Continue reading
Posted in Non-fiction, Photography
Tagged Health, Living Donor, Love, Organ Donation, Visual Art
53 Comments
The Renunciation
Stephen Mead is a published artist, writer and maker of short collage-films living in NY.