Elves speak
Elves speak
a six pass erasure poem
the poem:
The six passes:
The source material called me. Then called me again, showing me still and chimes as verbs.
Author: Janie Braverman
-
-
remember
remember
Source material for this eight pass erasure (nine, if one counts the title): “What Can Run But Never Walks, Has a Mouth But Never Talks, Has a Head But Never Weeps, Has a Bed But Never Sleeps? A River. A Sonnet.” from Paper Banners, by Jane Miller.
-
Invasive
Invasive
In June, I wrote about sea-faring iguanas in Carried Home, on the imagination of iguanas.
The source material for this post includes a close up photo of an iguana’s face: This Is What a Vindicated Iguana Looks Like.
In fairness to Dr. Daniel Mulcahy, evolutionary biologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin and author of the study referred to in the article, know that Dr. Mulcahy and his colleagues are “working to ensure that Clarion Island iguana eradication programs are stopped.”
Wish them immediate and complete success.
-
Death of a resident – again and again
Death of a resident – again and againAn off cycle post
Stolen gift cards – $500
Failure to report allegations of abuse, neglect, exploitation – $500
Improper use of physical restraints – $500
Failure to conduct timely employee background – $500
Resident death due to bowel obstruction, acute respiratory failure – $500
Stolen gift cards = the life of a resident
-
Death of a Resident Redux
Death of a Resident ReduxThings Happen
On May 8, 2025, I wrote about the death of a resident in an assisted living facility, The post, also about butterflies and starvation, is here.
This post is about yet another death of a resident in yet another assisted living facility. It is also about a bridge, how words matter, and an assault by fire.
Resident #19 remains unidentified in public documents.
The woman assaulted by fire has been identified in the press, but I’m not naming her here.
The source material regarding the workers on the bride was originally titled: “Faster Communication Could Have Saved Bridge Workers’ Lives, Safety Agency Says”
Updated, the source material became: “Investigators Zero In on Cause of Ship Outage Before Bridge Crash: A Misplaced Label”
The six men on the bridge, unnamed in either version of the source material:
José Mynor López
Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes
Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera
Maynor Yasir Suazo-Sandoval
Carlos Daniel Hernandez Estrella
Miguel Angel Luna Gonzalez
-
How is a stigma not like a zombie?
How is a stigma not like a zombie?
Alice Wong.
Writer, activist, founder of the Disability Visibility Project, 2024 MacArthur Foundation genius grant recipient.
Died November 14, 2025.
An obituary. A remembrance. Wikipedia. She was 51.
Let us remember Alice Wong. And remember there is always more work to do.
Wong’s obituary was published in The New York Times the day after her death.
On the same day, in a series titled The New Old Age, I was dismayed to find a column titled “Wheelchair? Hearing Aids? Yes. ‘Disabled’? No Way.”
Ways to kill a zombie are legend.
Ways to kill a stigma are not.
Read Alice Wong’s memoir, Year of the Tiger, An Activist’s Life, and the books she edited, Disability Visibility, First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, and Disability Intimacy.
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s iconic memoir about one small snail and her own chronic illness. Learn about invisible and dynamic disability.
Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System, Sonya Huber’s essays on disabling pain.
Too Late to Die Young, Nearly True Tales from a Life, memoir by Harriet McBryde Johnson.
Places I’ve Taken My Body, memoir, and The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, poems, both by Molly McCully Brown.
Raising a Rare Girl, memoir, by Heather Lanier.
Read Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black and Michael Northern.
Educate yourself. Don’t put all of that responsibility on people with disabilities. Many of us have enough to contend with already.
-
woof
woofIt’s all fun and games until …
Source material: Dog Accidentally Shoots and Injures a Pennsylvania Man, Police Say.
This would be funnier if not for the gun safety issues. Or maybe it’s not funny at all. Consider the following, all from the same source material:
The nonprofit Gun Violence Archive recorded the event as an accidental or negligent discharge of a firearm, among the 1,156 unintentional shootings in the United States it has recorded in 2025, as of [the] week [of November 14, 2025].
In 2018, Matt Branch, a Louisiana State University football player, was shot in the leg when a Labrador retriever named Titus stepped on the safety mechanism and trigger of his shotgun which had been placed on a truck bed during a hunting trip. His leg was amputated.
In March, a Memphis man told the police that he was grazed in the thigh by a bullet fired from a gun when his puppy, Oreo, got his paw stuck in the trigger…
In 2011, a duck hunter in Utah was shot in the buttocks when his dog stepped on a shotgun, injuring him, news reports said at the time.
-
we lived and we ate
we lived and we ateon this Thanksgiving Day
Source material: “Duration” by Deborah Kay Kelly, written after looking at a broadside of Ilya Kaminsky’s poem, “We Lived Happily During the War.”
-
Raw pine and antlers
Raw pine and antlersa seven pass poem for DKK
A seven pass poem from “Out West” by Deborah Kay Kelly. Click here to see her accompanying photographs.
Raw pine and antlers, a few skins. This room, its dusty windows claimed by cottonwoods that shine more than full-grown sunflowers, leaves smooth as persimmon. Under them, sheep shed lanolin and scat on the low breeze.
We walk downstream. Leaves float under the wide-timbered bridge like water-lanterns. We smooth the river beach with our hands and sit.
Until a bulb-nosed truck stops mid-bridge, a tight noon-shadow of gray-green metal, pitted-chrome bumper. Side panels crumpled like monstrous skin. Its engine-greased pulse builds to imminent explosion.
Who drives the bald cab? Whose fist pounds the hood? It doesn’t really matter. We walk like giants. When we were children, he shoved our faces in mud, counted to 100, but we are older, and made like a suspension bridge, to flex and persist over smother, even in high winds. -
A singing heart
A singing heartfor JTB, who makes my heart sing
Sourced via 4 passes and a little compression from Jane Hirshfield, “A Hand,” Given Sugar, Given Salt
Photo by the erasure artist, taken on the Mary Carter Greenway Trail where it lies west of the South Platte River
