Leukemia By Jackie Fox

Issue 10

The disintegrated blood
The tottering blood
The endless ring-a-rosy blood
The blood circled and buzzed
The blood was served
The blood was made sacrifice unto
How does that grab you, Blood?
O Blood, you’re far gone.

Source: Stephen King. The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger.

Method: I took part in the Poeming 2016, a poem-a-day poetry challenge in October using Stephen King novels as source material. My method on all the poems was to seek metaphors in illness (I strayed from that a couple of times), and to create remixed poems using no more than four consecutive pages (typically two or three. Again, I strayed from that but not a lot). The project was a lot of fun.

Jackie Fox lives and writes in Omaha, Nebraska. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and studied creative writing in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Rattle, the Bellevue Literary Review and Tar River Poetry, and in several anthologies including BARED: contemporary poetry and art on bras and breasts, and The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets