Each day, as I reluctantly get out of bed,
to face the sunlight and blindness,
I ask you to hold my hand so I
won’t feel afraid of standing still.
You wrap my fluttering pulse in threads
of warmth that traverse your palms,
dulling the edges of my anxiety.
You teach me to shake off rage
and laugh at the act of coming unglued.
How quickly I learned to seek your
voice in the clamor of being alive,
rely on the steady cadence of your heart
to quiet the noises that breathe in darkness.
You stand unwavering in the center of
our life together, a beacon that always finds me.
Feeling your fingers against mine,
I stand beside you, content to close my eyes
and let the sun shine on my face.
Susan Richardson is living, writing and going blind in Los Angeles. In addition to poetry, she writes a blog called, Stories from the Edge of Blindness. Her work has been published in Foxglove Journal, Amaryllis, The Writing Disorder and Eunoia Review, among others. She was awarded the Sheila-Na-Gig 2017 Winter Poetry Prize, featured in the Literary Juice Q&A Series, and chosen as the Ink Sweat & Tears March 2018 Poet of the Month. She also writes for the Arts and Lit Collective, Morality Park.
Natalie Crick, from the UK, has poetry published or forthcoming in a range of journals and magazines including Interpreters House, Ink In Thirds, The Penwood Review, The Chiron Review and Rust and Moth. Her work also features or is forthcoming in a number of anthologies, including Lehigh Valley Vanguard Collections 13. This year her poem ‘Sunday School’ was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Foxglove Journal 