If you're interested in smart, thoughtful, creative literary work on the web you probably already know Qarrtsiluni, the literary journal whose name comes from an Inupiaq word meaning "sitting in the darkness waiting for something to burst." The current issue is focused on Health, and has featured some fantastic material -- I'm especially struck by the recent poem Sarcoma by Marilyn Taylor, and also Marjorie Saiser's poem Loving My Daughter in the Mountains.

I'm pleased to be able to say that I have a poem in the Health issue, too, which has just gone live. It was written a few years ago, after my second stroke, and was inspired by a series of five photographs at the Williams College Museum of Art (learn more here.) The poem is called "Body," and it begins:

Tradition calls
for parchment, stuff
capable of surviving
stitches made from
tendons and glue.

The body too
is a scroll, scribed
in circles...

Read it (or listen to it) here: Body. And then feel free to leave a comment, either there or here...