Jarred Thompson
The Power of Chronic Illness
Every day is a poker game
with a hooded figure who’s always silent.
Every day you pound away the sickness
with weights, treadmills, steam rooms, salads, protein, pills.
Every day you kiss and hug and touch
coddling their fear in your hardened hands.
Every day you live beyond the pills
reducing a scaly devil to a plastic mannequin.
Every day it sits underneath your tongue
bulging out when the walls tighten around your lungs.
Every day, an invincible summer rises to meet
the Pluto of your nightmares and daydreams.
Every day, a controlled hatred
moves your feet up every stairway.
Every day you fracture, you break, you splinter,
then rebuild.
Every day a part of you is fighting
dreaming of forever.
Jarred Thompson‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, Type House Literary Magazine, Outcast Magazine, the Esthetic Apostle, Sky Island Journal, Cosmographia Books, Best New African Poets Anthology of 2016, and New Contrast Literary Journal. His chapbook Universes and Paradoxes was shortlisted for the Kingdom in the Wild Poetry Prize. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, New Contrast Literary Journal (forthcoming 2018), The Rainy Day Literary Magazine, ImageOutWrite, the Johannesburg Review of Books and Transcending the Flame: The Writivism Mentoring Anthology (Black Letter Media, 2018).
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