Lymphoma Meditation-1 ©2019 Michael Dickel

“…the ailing body points to culture, pain points to philosophy, language points to consciousness, and all point to what is still to be learned about our fragility, our mortality, and how to live a meaningful life.” Ann Jurecic, Illness as Narrative (Composition, Literacy, and Culture), p. 131

Unnameable

Large B-cell lymphoma with T cell-rich…
Damn, how do I slip that mouthful in.
To my life. My thought. This poem?

The tumor breached my spine, pressed
its attack onto nerves. A tactic to cut
communication channels. Painful alarum.

Yet here we arrive. The first day of Spring—
Shushan Purim. We walk in Jerusalem’s
Botanical Garden. The first chemical attack

on the tumor, the lymphoma, my body—
this day—dispensation given to fight back
against this pogrom in my very bones.

The red anemones, pink cyclamen,
something purple I cannot name,
shine with indifference to the wars

spinning toy

the night seems
so swiftly
on the move

waxing moon light
clouds in convoy
their silent fleet
so full and rapid
fills night sky

so immense
weightless
billowed riding
overhead
in silent procession
like a child’s
spinning toy

the vertigo
of days
leaves us
staggering
for night
as the moon
awaits the sun
we wait

glowing ends of cigarettes
light the passing
night
time fading
as piano
notes cascade
dying to silence
waiting for rhythm to
propel it back to life

as words wait
for the tongue
we wait for
the next thought
dreams made thought
wishes made well
acts of worship
in the careless and lost
the discarded and
half remembered

chants and prayers
invocations under the stars
scarifications in the
arms of lovers
wistful and wasted
moving above the earth
keeping sense of place
time and scale
advancing across night
to march or die
an army…

It wasn’t much
but he filled the cave
with ice,
left the stones padlocked
in their bodies.
Not even the moon
could enter.
Its light was comatose,
subliminal against the
dry, winter rock.
He would not leave
until everything he knew
fell from his mind
like hearsay.
Until he could walk out
no longer recognizable
beneath the blue trees.

Seth Jani lives in Seattle, WA, and is the founder of Seven CirclePress. Their work has appeared in American Poetry Journal, Chiron Review, The Comstock Review, Rust + Moth and Pretty Owl Poetry, among others. Their full-length collection, Night Fable, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2018. Visit them at https://www.sethjani.com.

Writing about his paintings from the 1970s which had been influenced by the landscape of Wiltshire and the poetry of Thomas Hardy, David Inshaw suggested that his main aim “was to produce a picture that held a moment in time, but unlike a photograph, which only records an event.” Comparing the world of a painting with that of the camera he went on to point out “a painting could give a more universal, deeper meaning to that moment by composing one instant from lots of different unrelated moments.” And so ‘The Badminton Game’, originally given a title from the early Hardy poem ‘She, To Him’,
holds a stillness which is quite remarkable and it interestingly graced a wall in Number 10 in 1997!

This new publication from Two Rivers Press is extremely attractive and the stillness of Inshaw’s focus upon more than the moment is complimented by the way in…

Courtesy of JR Korpa, Unsplash

These lessons come to me from dreams.
Dreams, like the fish in the sea
Or the birds in the sky
Cannot be taught
But they can teach us how to dance
When we’re alone.
Mike Stone

When you touch
You are touched by Otherness.
The soft grasses bend to feel your feet
The gentle breezes memorize your face
The clothes hold your nakedness in myriad hands
Whatever you feel feels you.
When you taste
You are tasted by Otherness.
The bittersweet tangerine tastes you in its spray
Your lover’s tongue in your mouth tastes you.
When you smell
You are smelled by Otherness.
When you breathe your lover’s breath
Her air is yours.
These lessons come to me from dreams.
Dreams, like the fish in the sea
Or the birds in the sky
Cannot be taught
But they can teach us how to dance

Taken on a trip in 2016 with World Vision to Sierra Leone. Courtesy of Annie Spratt, Unsplash

I Read a Poem Today

I read a poem today and decided
I must deed it to some lost, lonely
fatherless child… to embrace her

along her stone path, invoke sanity
I want to tell her: don’t sell out your
dearest dreams or buy the social OS

Instead, let the poem play you like a
musician her viola, rewriting lonely
into sapphire solitude, silken sanctity

Let it wash you like the spray of whales
Let it drench your body in the music
of your soul, singing pure prana into

the marrow and margins of your life
Let your shaman soul name your muse,
find yourself posing poetry as power and

discover the amethyst bliss of words
woven from strands of your own DNA
Yes. I read a poem today and decided
I must deed it…