Brandon Lopez

Brandon Lopez is a Chicano writer, living and working in Portland, Oregon. He grew up in Maine. He often writes about the spaces between cultures, or the parts that go unseen. He has been published in Subnivean Lit Mag, has an ongoing writing project under the name Messengers of Lahar and has published zines of poetry and other writings. 

Easy read of the poem in the image above:

A Sickness Caused By Holes

After the news from the doctor we continued to play games at tables laid out in intricate patterns. We laughed with painted faces and cried tears that smeared our joy into ruined masks of grotesque sadness. The doctor said there was no cure for this sickness of the brain that leaked fluid into the ears, which would then eat the brain and subsequently the person and soul, attached to the brain, in a fever, the way a small wad of dryer lint can cause a massive fire that vanishes all signs of previous existence. We thought continuously about the holes but never talked about them. Through this tribulation we found that sickness is a hole that is sometimes caused by holes, leaving what was once whole, unwhole. We continued day to day as we did before the sickness, before the holes that leaked fluid that would eventually sicken the brain. As the days passed and the dripping of fluid continued like a leaky faucet that keeps light sleepers up at night with the timed tap of drips inside an aluminum tub, we thought of the holes and the fluid but didn’t think of the brain. Because thinking of the brain was like thinking about the soul and we weren’t sure what was to come of something so unattached. Did the soul now have holes? Could this sickness invade something so pure and make it unwell? And we never learned how to pronounce or spell this sickness no matter how many times we were asked about it.