Normally when I send out the gleeful email telling you that someone has had the excellent taste to publish a piece of my writing, I can link to a place where you can either read the piece or give the publisher money to receive a copy of it. The Sacramento Poetry Center's journal, Tule Review, however, does not seem to make either of these actions possible — I know! I don't get it either! — and so I've reproduced Ars Medica below for your enjoyment. (Content warning for this piece: contains cancer.)

Happily, Crab Fat Magazine provides 88 pages of poetry, prose, and art for download, including my poem When Flesh Is the Winding Sheet, for download, so that's a straightforward way to read. (This is a poem I'm particularly proud of.)

In other news, Lunch Ticket has nominated my poem Dysthymia for inclusion in the 2015 Best of the Net anthology from Sundress Publications; I was also nominated last year for Momos, so if I can persuade an editor to do the same next year, I'll be on a genuine streak!

This is probably the moment to remind you that I keep a running list of my publication credits, and it's never a bad idea to spend an unseasonably warm winter afternoon reading back issues of obscure literary magazines. Happy New Year!

<3—
Elizabeth
 

Ars Medica

She finds a lump,
one morning in the shower,
and when the doctor tells us
it's nothing,
calcification, fatty deposits, utterly benign,
she weeps with relief.

I drive her home and go upstairs,
where I touch each of my ribs, the floating disc of my kneecap,
probe for the intimately foreign within me,
seek out some blemish

I can point to,
some physical taint of the ache echoing between my bones.

But as always, my disease slips away from me:
for something that has defined me,
it resents borders, corrupts explanations.

There is so much poison within us,
mutinying cells blossoming into oleander,
memories contaminating behavior long after it's useful.
We are the cancers,
we carry our infections with us like pocket-lint,
scattering pestilence with shed scraps of skin.