Winner 1st Place – Pamela Wynn
Responding to Well-Intended Comments
and Advice on Living with “Chronic” Pain
A bird is a bird, a knife is a knife. . .
pain is pain.
I don’t know how you bear it.
You would if you had to.
I’ve been sick, but it’s nothing like what you live with.
Please, it’s not a contest.
You always have a smile on your face.
She’s aware brightly feathered bluebirds and cardinals
are preferred to dark-natured crows.
Try a support group.
You go, report back:
1) enough of her time is pilfered by her health
2) she bores easily
3) privacy, privacy, privacy.
Slow down.
Something somewhere is always left undone. . .
Eat more meat / Eat less meat
Drink more water / Drink less water
Avoid caffeine / Drink caffeine
Take vitamins B, C, and D
Try Tiger Balm / Cayenne / Fish oil
A spoonful of honey every day
“Eye of newt, and toe of frog
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog….”
Anything you want to add?
Pray—have faith.
Defective DNA answers to no one.
Jesus turned water to wine.
That was a long time ago.
Write about it.
Fine, this is it.
Pamela Wynn is retired from teaching and lives in Minnesota. Though only diagnosed by a geneticist at age 32, much of her life time has and continues to involve attending to the specific needs and concerns associated with living with the genetic disorder Ehlers Danlos Syndrome Hypermobile Type.
2nd Place – Veronica Tucker MD
Motherhood, Post-Shift
I come home
and my child wants to play—
blocks scattered,
tiny hands reaching
for mine.
But my hands
are still holding
what I can’t put down—
the weight of bodies
I couldn’t save,
the echo of voices
that don’t belong here.
I sit on the floor,
smile where it fits,
stack plastic bricks
into something
that looks like
I’m present.
But inside,
I’m still in that room,
still hearing
what won’t stop.
Motherhood demands
you be whole.
But some days,
all I have
are pieces.
Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, lifelong New Englander, and married mother of three. Her writing explores the intersections of caregiving, trauma, and healing—both in her patients and herself.
3rd Place Michelle Tram
A Game Called Migraine
When we were young we’d play
an innocent game of spot-a-rainbow—
find an illusory end, sink our
silly hands into gold so treasured,
a leprechaun’s pot so cherished.
I was lucky to see the heavens
where no one else could, above
school yards, atop park benches,
and straddling sidewalk crevices—
fluid, lucent, transcendent,
mine.
Yet when did an ethereal prism
we once sought to claim as ours
become a carnal prison
for mind’s sickly ravaged hours?
Each week brings a new perdition,
a continuum of flashing colors
promising two, four, or countless
hours of cacophony in a godless
Gehenna.
As pinks, whites, and greens
poison lost vision, searing light and
babel bathe my throat in bile,
leaving prayer futile to the same game
we played when we were young.
If I find the lucky pot of gold,
is that where this pain ends?
Michelle Tram is a first year medical student at Albany Medical College. Her writing can be found in Brain&Life Magazine, Blue Marble Review, Corvus Review, and others.