I Keep Sitting In The Madhouse / Yearning For / A Mad Transsexual Witchspell
– Abigail Silversmith Irfan
I Keep Sitting In The Madhouse
Here in the bed I was tied to before,
I sit,
thinking of possibilities we hold –
us and our mad kin.
The world takes holding away from our bodies and make them fall.
Nobody yearns for tartarus.
Continue reading “Abigail Silversmith Irfan “
Piece 1:
If I could travel back in time:
Well…if I could travel back in time, there’s too many things I’d like to do, too many places I’d like to go, too many people I’d like to meet. My dreams go big and avoid the possibility of going back to a time I existed in; are my heart and mind protecting me?
Mexico City, Mexico, 1690: I’d do a prayer with sapphic proto-feminist nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and maybe we could even exchange poetry.
Paris, France, 1794: I’d offer comfort and aid to a depressed, lonely, newcomer to motherhood Mary Wollstonecraft, so maybe she could get some sleep and realize pursuing Imlay was a lost cause.
Continue reading “Maria A”
That’s It
By Bonnie Henderson Schell
Strange things were happening to me, and I was scared. I knew that I had developed tardive dyskinesia and torticollis. The skin around my lips was chapped because my tongue hung out of my mouth, making a circle, licking my lips. I drooled all night on my pillow and down the front of my clothes. It was difficult not to walk to the left because lately my neck and body were painfully twisted in that direction so that the necklines of my sweaters and tunics fell off my left shoulder. I had stopped going to lunch with anyone and turned down phone calls using Facetime. I avoided the mirror over the sink.
Continue reading “Bonnie Henderson Schell”
Psychiatrists and social workers had already decided before I was born that I was going to be a mental patient. Continue reading “The Other Half”
Madwomen in the Attic 