Old teeth smacking disdainfully

White and pink, a whole mouthful of old teeth smacking disdainfully. They covered a bright hole.

In the introduction to The Summer Book, Kathryn Davis writes of an “island’s allure—that sense it gives you of being in the presence of something that has no need of you.” As someone who has been chronically ill for more than ten year, it struck me that this is how I feel, or have been made to feel, about society. As a chronically ill person it is hard not to end up in the margins. Looking in from the sidelines you feel ignored, left out, and even vilified and disbelieved.

I’m trying to express those experiences in my found lines of poetry and in the collages. But I also want to go beyond the negative and search for resilience and hope. I hope you’ll take this journey with me.

Lush, evil leaves

It was drenched like a rain forest of lush, evil leaves. Angrily looking, hardly flowering.

I was inspired by Sarah J. Sloat’s Hotel Almighty, which was born from a book-length erasure poetry and collage art project performed on the pages of Stephen King’s Misery, to start my very own similar project. My book of choice is Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. This is the first page.