1.1 / HEALTH AND HEALING

The comics, poems, short stories, and nonfiction essays in this folio explore recovery, denial, joy, and, via a little speculative fiction, the saving or damning impacts of forgetting.

Comorbid Among the living & the dying, IV bags filled with blood or chemo meds, air disinfected, floor & walls antiseptic & machines humming.

  Many pagans believed in the five sacred mysteries of blood: birth, menarche, pregnancy and birthing, menopause, and death. Birth You rode in on your mother’s tidal prayer. I baptized you in vernix and blood. Menarche I came to you again at ten— such a rusty entrance, a door swinging open.

Doctors try genetically modified poliovirus As experimental brain cancer treatment.

Vibrate low, moon throat, gargle salt. Debris up and down the canal of the body. I pay a woman with long braids to stretch my body like a canvas, press on the points that gleam with pain, the tiny needles sticky in skin, energy clinging like moths to light.

  _______ Dana McKenna and Ben Clark live, work, and write in Chicago, Illinois.

Is the desert a complaint against rain? I want to feel something soft. But the water in this bar is awful, and the television raves and raves. A man waves from a golf cart, the ice waters my drink, a country blows up. My hands don’t fit around anything anymore. Rocks glass, neck, apparition.

I’ve rolled the windows up and the midafternoon sun is trapped in my car. I sit in the parking lot, sweating. I scroll through Instagram and Twitter. After ten years—approximately the latter forty percent of my life thus far—I am going off hormonal birth control. Finally I take a straight-faced selfie: the “before” picture.

I. It’s a stay-cation, I tell the check-in clerk. My husband is watching the kids so I can have some time to myself. You’re lucky, she says while handing me a plastic keycard with a smile so wide, I’d swear her teeth were slathered with Vaseline.

Age 12 (1976) My teeth are rotting out of my head. “Twenty-two cavities,” says the dentist sternly at my first visit ever. My mother, a non-believer in Western medicine, looks shocked. I say nothing but I give my mom a look that says, “Who’s the idiot who thought clove oil would fix cavities.

  ______ Caits Meissner is a D.I.Y.-spirited, poly-creative writer, artist and cultural worker, and the author of the illustrated hybrid poetry book Let It Die Hungry (The Operating System, 2016). She currently serves as the Prison and Justice Writing Program Director at PEN America.

The two of them, Manuela and Daniel, who founded this operation, have permits to come to the beach so late and bring vans of tourists who want to see the turtles.

“For the water women everywhere”               Naiya hated the days she could not return Kevin’s calls or days when she could not come to him. Naiya didn’t know if she would ever be able to tell Kevin about the rape.  Some days she could not bear to be touched.

Dear bruised eye that opens, Dear broken bone that heals, Dear wrist scars that fade, Dear pills vomited on floor, Dear untied noose from a tree, Dear empty street after midnight, Dear country road without cars, Dear ocean crashing upon rocks, Dear cold morning at sunrise, Dear light glinting off water, Dear spray from a

When I was seventeen, I was insatiable for experiences that would leave me breathless.  No matter that we lived in Campos, a tired village with one dusty street and crumbly homes.  I liked to tell myself that adventures could be had anywhere.

Imagine thousands of millions of lights twitching along the various ceilings of New York’s five boroughs—office buildings, brownstones, townhouses, projects, and bodegas—then, poof: dying all at once. The hot trains stuck underneath the city, and all of the people crawling out of their doors, then along the wet, dark tunnels, unable to see.

For two and a half years I lived in a house with Ariel on the West Side of Olympia. It was the nicest house I’d lived in yet, with wood floors and blue tile in the bathroom. The house was $1050 to rent.

When my father returned home from prison for the first time since my birth, I was a five-year-old kid from Brooklyn whose world consisted of navigating the pews of our storefront church and catching roaches with a plastic cup and a rusted can of Raid in our one-bedroom in Bushwick.

The Roths had a pool—of course they had a pool, my mother scoffed—and Elise often lay out drinking gin and tanning.  Where she got the gin I was never sure, but she invited me to join her one summer afternoon when I was fifteen and she was eighteen.

When I open my eyes, my gaze meets a washi window shade. Aglow with sunlight, it tells me I’m not at home. Even with this reminder, I need a moment to place myself.

Recovery Nostalgia for illness is a coin I try not to spend all at once Though spent is a feeling I miss Spent: a prize-winning stillness Nothing like it A complete thesis I put the thought in a drawer Put the drawer in the river Hold myself together                                                 I will purge out the

Eurasian Skylark (alauda arvensis) “Rising in arcs ever higher until almost out of sight, the songster flutters and sings continuously for three or four minutes, then folds his wings and falls like a stone toward the center of his territory.

& i don’t want to break no more Verse I white walls white jackets white sheets black stethoscope wrapped around a white neck of one doctor with black words that cut black like cancer inside this black body me me can’t see the cancer see the way the cancer sees me & you together all

Always be tending is a three-word statement that mirrors the trinity of what constitutes it: bodily function (anger about bodily function); work (or housework, specifically, or labor, generally); and money (and the lack thereof). Tending is analogous to hustling. Both are simple yet unending acts that become complicated through their unendingness.

This framework for making art evolved for me from the step-by-step process in printmaking, and also coding art, and also working for a computer company for a while, from their troubleshooting methodology and step-by-step approach to emotional responses from clients. I really enjoy an ongoing dialogue with the work.