Stephanie Johnson By Stephanie Johnson
A life of leisure, my friends called it,
a cage is what I say.
Ancient Kindle, cracked screen,
pyramid of round amber bottles
on a side table,
a digital voice tells me when to
take each pill.
In my diligence to keep up my
“quality of life” I have outlived
all those friends.
I’m not retired, I’m just tired.
Shuffled between appointments,
And planned excursions,
and my sitting room.
Waiting as I fall to bits,
piece by piece deconstructed,
I wonder why
I stopped?
Stephanie Johnson lives with type 1 diabetes and has spent most of her adult life overseas teaching English literature, ESL, and Spanish at universities and adult education settings around the world. Her writing usually focuses on the slightly uncomfortable space of the expatriation/ repatriation experience. She was a 2022 Judge for NYC Midnight and is an Associate Editor at Novel Slices. She is currently based in Sydney, Australia.
Why we chose this piece: We love Stephanie’s wry, biting voice and her use of jagged rhythms. The ending also stirs up some intriguing ambiguity. When we spoke with the author, she told us the poem was inspired by when she had to get someone close to her situated into assisted living at the beginning of the pandemic. This led to her speculating about how she would be at that point in her life. Her loved one seemed to just kind of lose their inertia, which stirred up the confusion mimicked at the end of the poem. Contemplating your own mortality is…a lot.
