Month: November 2018

Tang of Chlorophyll

Flowers coagulate in the

living room you can’t see

because I have strung ten thousand

chandeliers from the foil ceiling.

The season is polished,

a wave of salt rolls over

the soil at the other end of the street

but here is nothing but

the tang of chlorophyll and breath.

Enclosed in my equatorial dress,

I am as a letter to the star,

whose power I painted

electrical in a posh home,

mixed media mural on my ceiling,

cheap imitation regality.

The ground shakes.

The scent of salt

blossoms from the door.

Tears in my pale eyes,

petals shriveling.

And still my lights do not

go out.

Ice, Shopping, Magazine

Yesterday our world was smothered by ice. A fog rolled in during the afternoon, and then all of it froze. Every blade of grass was covered in white icing. Every street was a skating rink. It was too risky to drive anywhere, so we stayed in by the fire. Our house feels so cozy with the new sofa and my new painting and my lamp decorated for the autumn/winter season.

Today I went to At Home, then drove for awhile, then went to Trader Joe’s. I came home and began to work on revising and posting some poetry, when I suddenly got so tired I had to lay down. I just got up. The only reason I’m up is because it was time for our wonderful babysitter, G, to go home and I wanted to hear about Angelica’s day and sign G’s log book for her hours.

I am hoping to write tonight after Craig goes to bed early for his second day shift. He’ll go to bed around 6. I haven’t written fresh poems in weeks due to..problems.

I revamped the magazine! The literary magazine I founded and edit has been on hiatus for awhile. Summer was filled with instability and travel, as was the fall. I contacted Duotrope and got the magazine listed to show up in searches for several genres and styles. I hadn’t realized it before, but the way my little litmag was listed it only showed up under general searches – along with thousands of others. If anyone searched for their particular genre or style, which most people do, my magazine wouldn’t have shown up.

Now I’m looking for science fiction, poetry, art, horror, magical realism, memoir, the supernatural (no, I don’t mean Twilight fanfic), poetry chapbooks, and more. I want my magazine to be one of the best – not necessarily by ranking, but from publishing interesting writing. Basically the magazine will be part poetry, part weird or dark writing, and part art. Photography, painting, glass, etc. It might seem eclectic, but I am making a magazine that I want to read. I hadn’t opened my mind to much genre fiction before, but I love it and nothing would make me happier than to have some dystopian fiction and horror in my inbox. It feels a little odd to mix that in with poetry, but I will see how it goes.

I redesigned the site as much as I could without the help of an actual web designer. I changed the banner, made new pages, updated the about and submissions pages etc. Hopefully it looks nicer.

New Furniture!

Craig has been off work from Thursday to Sunday this week. He was so sweet. He bought me a new sofa, a big sectional with an even longer chaise than what I had on the green sofa. The new one is gray and has a huge ottoman. I am so cozy on it.

The initial thought was that if I have to have the surgery that the doctor said I have to have, I will be sleeping downstairs with a cast on. The green sofa is too short for me to stretch out with a pillow and have my leg completely out straight with the cast. Realistically, if I don’t have that surgery I’ll have to have another one. Being in a two-story house, I have to pick a floor. I don’t want to be lonely all the time so I picked downstairs.

Ultimately, what confirmed our decision to get another sofa came from other factors. We could have gotten a futon for me to sleep on, although the futon we found was not very comfortable. But we realize that realistically we should have another sofa. When family comes to visit there isn’t enough room for all of us to sit down. Usually people end up sitting on dining room table chairs for most of the day. Those are nice chairs to have dinner on, but they’re much less comfortable if you’re spending an afternoon on them. Vicki and Joel, Craig’s parents, have come to visit us twice already this year and whenever they come they don’t have a good place to sit. We’re hoping that my parents will be out this year or next, and when they come they won’t have a place to sit either. We definitely feel bad when people come across the country to visit us and we don’t even have comfortable seating for them. On top of that, with the shape of the room, if you’re not sitting on the sofa there’s not really room for you to sit with the family so you have to sit behind everybody.

Besides that, we’ve been needing more seating. Now the green sofa is in the library. I have a comfortable and spacious place to sit and read, or to sit and read to Angelica. It’s still a nice sofa and there is no way that it needs to be trashed yet, so the library is a wonderful new home for it. The big, older chair that was in the library has been moved up the craft room. If I go up there to look at my poetry books I can sit down on that chair and have a perfect view of Pikes Peak while I read. So all in all it worked out.

Removing A Bone

Wednesday I went back to the podiatrist I have been seeing about my foot pain, ankle pain, and the burning pain where my leg meets my foot. I found out I need an ankle replacement, which is major surgery.

My ankle bone will be removed. The whole thing. It has huge lesions, so the doctor doesn’t think it is salvageable. It will be replaced with a synthetic bone substitute around which my natural bone is supposed to grow. Additionally, he said that the pain where my leg meets my foot, that burning pain I’ve had for years, is likely because the bottom of my leg bone (and I forget which one), also has lesions on it where it meets the ankle. That will likely have to be filled in.

I really like this doctor and he seems very knowledgeable, catching several problems that the doctors I saw in Virginia did not catch. He gave me a copy of the MRI results and showed me on a model of the bone what he was talking about and how big the lesions were. They really do take up pretty much the whole bone. It’s possible that some of the bone is even dead. I am still getting second opinion from another doctor, an orthopaedic surgeon, just to make sure there are no other options that maybe my doctor didn’t think of. This doctor has a different specialty, he’s an orthopedic surgeon, so he may have a different perspective. But looking at the MRI paperwork and having been shown on a model of the bone what’s going on, I really don’t think that the other doctor is going to have a different opinion. If he does have a different opinion I don’t think it will be drastically different.

If in fact his opinion is drastically different I won’t even know what to do. They’re both doctors. They both do Foot and Ankle surgeries. The doctor I’m currently seeing has tons of good reviews and the doctor on getting a second opinion from doesn’t really have any reviews. On a bright note that means he doesn’t have any bad reviews, at least not that I was able to find, but he doesn’t have any good ones either to let me know that he’s reliable. If he tells me my phone is salvageable and that I don’t need to do the surgery, will I believe him? I would like to believe him because the surgery is going to be agonizing, but I’m being cautious too. For years I have tried to get this foot fixed. I’ve had two surgeries on it already. I had a bone infection in my foot to go with it all. I want whatever I do to be the last surgery on my foot. If that means going through a terrible surgery as opposed to a milder one, it’s probably worth doing just to make sure that I can go back to living my life the way I used to and taking long walks. I just want this to be over. So if the doctor giving me a second opinion suggests not doing surgery or suggests a drastically different surgery, I’m really going to have to weigh my options and think about the different explanations both of them gave. I would rather do a terrible surgery now and have it over with then try a milder surgery and find out it didn’t really work and then have to do the terrible surgery. I don’t want to be laid up any longer than I have to be. So what I need is either for the doctors to be on the same page, or for this doctor giving me the second opinion to have a really good explanation of a better alternative. I so hope there is another way. Having an entire bone of my body literally just removed sounds terrible, and it probably doesn’t sound half as terrible as it actually is.

I have been asking people on Foot and Ankle pages how bad the pain for the surgery is. Very few people have had the surgery as drastically as the first doctor says I need to do it. Of those who have done it or have done something similar, it’s unanimous that the pain is so bad that you don’t sleep for days. One person compared the pain to having been put through a meat grinder. If you know me, you know I am a total sissy. I feel like running at the very thought of doing this. I just don’t know what else to do. I’ve got to fix my foot.