Bio

Lois Elaine Heckman grew up in Los Angeles, receiving a degree in Italian from UCLA. She has lived for many years as an expat in Milan, Italy, becoming a volunteer nurse and first aid instructor for the Italian Red Cross. Her works have appeared previously in The Fib Review, and among her other past and forthcoming credits are Boston Literary Magazine, Shot Glass Journal, Victorian Violet Press, Lucid Rhythms, Tilt-a-Whirl, Prole, The Sonnet Scroll at the Poetry Porch and Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. She is the proud winner of the 2010 New England Shakespeare Festival Rubber Ducky Sonnet Contest.

In
the
spark of
a moment,
life separated
from survival. Sudden impact
broke the neck's connection, leaving a knowledge, a raw
sensitivity, memories
free-floating
on their
own
and
wasted
intentions
in cartoon clouds, the
mind no longer fit to command
action and reaction, but just to observe each day's
inexorable atrophy,
the unquenched orchids
withering
on their
spent
stalks.