Pain, on a Scale of 1-10

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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Who isn’t sick
of being Sisyphus, pushing the rock
of your body daily, up from the bed?

When someone says hypochondriac
all I can think is, give me a shot

of adrenaline irradiate this burden
no pain, no need to gain.

So many tried
and failed treatments I say
give it a name
call it, a filament
spun into tourniquet

anomaly twisted to penalty, an infestation
scaling my nerves.

✷

What about heartache? multiple strains
of arthritis, hers, her child’s,
the husband leaves

she’s a power outage
a walking specter in bruised daylight
what bandage or antiseptic for her plight?
was there an expiration date
for rupture?
pathologic or melancholic,
her grieving—
a trail of gauze.

✷

A man says, “it’s transient”—
he’s seeking
ground—a rock

the war
still resides inside, amps up
his sugared house
bloody lows and highs, twitchy
brood of his eyes
a bilious babble, warbles
like a bird of necrosis
winged psychosis

his fractured peace
begs for measure.

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Suzanne Edison’s full-length book, Since the House Is Burning, was published by MoonPath Press in 2022. Her chapbook, The Body Lives Its Undoing, was published in 2018. Poetry can be found in Bracken, Whale Road Review, Mom Egg Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, JAMA, HEAL, SWWIM Every Day, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and in several anthologies including Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism and Awakening, and The Healing Art of Writing, Volume One. Suzanne is a Hedgebrook 2019 alum and teaches writing workshops through UCSF Chronic Illness Center and at Richard Hugo House in Seattle.