Shilo Niziolek
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Shilo Niziolek's (she/her) creative nonfiction book, FEVER, is out from Querencia Press. Her chapbook, A Thousand Winters In Me, is out from Gasher Press. I Am Not An Erosion: Poems Against Decay, a micro chapbook of collage poetry was part of Ghost City Press’s online summer series 2022. Her work has appeared in Pork Belly Press, [PANK], Juked, Entropy, Oregon Humanities, HerStry, among others, and is forthcoming in Phoebe Journal, Crab Creek Review, Literary Mama, Sunday Mornings at the River, and Pumpernickel House. Shilo holds an MFA from New England College and is Associate Faculty at Clackamas Community College.
Illness as Epithalamium
Online I accidentally read about a woman
with antiphospholid syndrome—my new one,
added to the increasingly long list—who had her first
stroke at fourteen. I keep thinking about death,
which isn’t a new thing for someone like me,
tethered so closely as we are together, bound
and gagged by near deaths and degenerative
conditions and whose elder dog lays near after
jumping off the couch to the surprise of random
pain, looking at her back end as the betrayer, the
enemy. It is all these days alone that are harrying me.
If my blood clots somewhere else, not in my leg,
my body unable to drive myself to the ER like it did
that recent spring evening, what then? No offspring
here to see me slump over, midday and halfway to
my execution. No children to call 911 and a partner
at work long hours. I want to be the one who lifts,
who drives, who eventually carries me home.
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