All posts tagged: Disability Pride Month

Excerpt from Cattail

By HAITAO XU

Excerpted from Cattail, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2024. 

1.

Kargh, pzzzs, kargh. Good morning, Revolutionary comrades! The sun is rising;  
Kargh, pzzsz . . . the war drum is beating!

Again, the formidable metal rooster atop the office building of Sunrise People’s Commune Brigade Three shattered the quiet early morning with its violent static coughs and squawks. 

Hearing it, Cattail, a tall and thin girl in a faded purple winter coat, kicked the dirt floor of the kitchen, a lean-to attached to their main dwelling, which consisted of a hut with two bedrooms and a common area. 

She should have the breakfast ready. But their meal, sweet potato soup, the same food they have twice a day in winter, was not boiling yet. The sweet potatoes were like stones. She knew the loudspeaker would soon summon every commune member, all the adult residents of Brigade Three, to report to work.

Excerpt from Cattail
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Fatigue Can Shatter A Person

By ED YONG 

This piece originally appeared in The Atlantic. Journalist Ed Yong will be a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2024. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.  

headshot of journalist ed yong

 

Alexis Misko’s health has improved enough that, once a month, she can leave her house for a few hours. First, she needs to build up her energy by lying in a dark room for the better part of two days, doing little more than listening to audiobooks. Then she needs a driver, a quiet destination where she can lie down, and days of rest to recover afterward. The brief outdoor joy “never quite feels like enough,” she told me, but it’s so much more than what she managed in her first year of long COVID, when she couldn’t sit upright for more than an hour or stand for more than 10 minutes. Now, at least, she can watch TV on the same day she takes a shower.

Fatigue Can Shatter A Person
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A Photon Takes the Shortest Path

By ALEX FOSTER

Every second, somewhere in the universe, a star explodes. All life within a trillion miles is condemned to apocalypse, all love forgotten. A supernova spits up a photon, a dribble of light, which rolls onward to another star and another before its path is intercepted by a giant, flailing planet Earth.

On which an ambulance, spraying its own red and blue photons into windows and lower eyelids, rockets down Michigan Avenue. Inside, a twenty-two-year-old woman sits upright on a stretcher, looking all around, proving her physical haleness by screaming at the top of her lungs, because until fifteen minutes ago, she didn’t know that she was pregnant, though she’d felt ill for some time, and then her water broke in a Starbucks bathroom.

At a moment of relative simultaneity, our photon is pulsing through clean air, through airplane windows and white linen kites. It skims a lake and pinballs in a web of sleek skyscrapers.

The woman, admittedly, would not have boasted a fully harmonious relationship with her body before all this; now, minutes after giving birth, things have devolved into open hostility. She’s clawing at her legs. She’s stubbing her toes on the steel door frame. Life is an improbability. It’s an unlikely confluence of pharmacological and genetic circumstances to be eight months pregnant and not realize. The ambulance swerves. She’ll be sick. It doesn’t help that she’s hungover. That her few bouts of morning sickness in the months past could be so easily blamed on margaritas and boxed wine.

A Photon Takes the Shortest Path
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Amblyopia

By ANANDA LIMA

I close my right eye meu olho direito
and see everything tudo                    que
my mother my father meus pais              no meu país    
didn’t                                                              
know                                                            não sabiam 
to do                                                tudo
            then                               que fazer?
                                                                      e hoje, minha vista cansada

Amblyopia
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Making Space for the Common Cyborg: an Interview with Jillian Weise

T. K. DALTON interviews JILLIAN WEISE

Jillian Weise is the author of the novel The Colony (2010) and the poetry collections The Amputee’s Guide to Sex (2007) and The Book of Goodbyes (2013), the latter of which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her writing appears in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The New Republic, Tin House, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Clemson University in South Carolina.

Making Space for the Common Cyborg: an Interview with Jillian Weise
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