Winter 2025 - Vol. 22, Issue 1

This guy wants me
to admit, to cry, to repent that it’s all been
a hoax, this pain stuff, just something
roleplayed as worry and weakness; remember
playing “Sick-Day,” your mother tucking you in
with a cool cloth, saying hush, saying rest,
and you lay still as the bed, your limbs
heavy as sandbags, away, away,
then the slow drift of fever, the night’s silence.

But it’s only exhaustion, and the gravity
of the real world, where a kid, as we know,
has to get up, sooner or later, or they
begin to worry about what’s real, what’s not.

So up from the beautiful, silent orbit,
that slow pull called effort. Come on,

The doctor insists, like your mother shaking
your shoulder at dawn, irate, when all
she wanted was for you to admit, just for a bit
longer, that it’s in your head. O, the body’s betrayal,
how a heart ignites its suffering, and the fist
of the world comes down on your bones.