Another Day at PT
on new ways to rate pain ( and a new zine)
The Naming
by Laura L. Hansen
It's funny how I refuse
to call it pain ---
it feels more like a tensing,
a clutching, a gripping ---
until it reaches out and out,
joining one small hurt
to another, one stretched muscle
to one knotted, until it becomes
a mass of twisted tentacles,
barbed like roses,
(no, like steel,)
and then the fatal blow
as it creeps up under the skull
where no stretch or healing
massage can reach. Finally,
definitively, pain.What do you rate your pain today they ask every time I come in. How many ways can we come up with to describe pain? Lately, I’ve been thinking colors might be better than numbers and I wonder if discomfort is the same as pain. Basic questions that should be easily answerable often are not. What we are willing to put up with on one day is not the same as the next. Our tolerances are variable. Our ability to explain, inadequate.
And here is the new Zine I made this week. I was inspired by a post from Kortney Garrison where I saw she made her zine by gluing the text directly to a folded magazine page. (I usually do some sort of collage first.) The text in my zine was inspired by Greg Watson’s The Visitor. I wrote two short poems using words I found in his wonderful piece.
The zine is next and below that, beyond the paywall (which I rarely use) is the text of Watson’s prose poem and both of the new poems I created.
Watson’s The Visitor and my “blackout” poems Watson Redux 1 and Watson Redux II below paywall. For paid subscribers, bless your hearts, and those that are curious about process.
