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 credits are Boston Literary Magazine, Shot Glass Journal, Bent Ear Review, Tilt-a-Whirl, The Sonnet Scroll, Persimmon Tree and Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. She won the 2010 New England Shakespeare Festival Rubber Ducky Sonnet Contest, and has placed in various international competitions, including Poetry on the Lake in 2012 and 2013, and the Hungry Hill Poetry Prize in 2012. Her chapbook, "Out of Nowhere" (White Violet Press), was published by Kelsay Books in 2013.

Sorrow ambushes, floating me away on its pain
feathers to a world I do not
want to inhabit.
I gather
sandbag
pounds
that
slowly
weigh me back
down to survival,
embracing food to substitute
joy, filling hollowness with the pleasures of the mouth.