Life is flinching in the midst of breathing, gasping at the thought of dying. It’s climbing ropeless up sheer rock faces, groping for the next finger-hole of hope. Steady on! Only a thousand feet to go and after that a jungle, a minefield, a rapid. (Can I stop smiling now?) Once, not long ago, I was flung off the cliff of the moment, thrust into an illicit relationship with destiny, an affair not of my making. Was I making love or being raped? The lines were fuzzy.

— Chila Woychik

Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to ascribing.

— Chila Woychik

Oh God, for a few who will love me in tiny ways every single day of my flashing existence. For a mere one or two who will treat me like the trash I am, who will love the smell of garbage and rummage through the bin of my failings to find the wrapped cheeseburger they can do without but consider long enough to get their taste buds used to the idea. Oh, for a melodious tongue to sing me a song about french fries.

— Chila Woychik

PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATHConventions bleed my soul squeeze me old wear me gray like a headstone in transit. It’s tradition and form—fear of the unknown—driving me deaden tight spaces darkly. I cry aloud but who can hear when I stand alone in the middle of an art show….

— Chila Woychik

Split your skull—a hatchet works well enough. Take a more delicate instrument—a scalpel, perhaps—and make a hand-sized slit; it doesn’t matter where. Reach in (no glove needed), plunge down to the very bottom, pinch the inside layer of membrane and yank, hard. If it feels like you’ve just turned your brain inside out, you have. Writing is brain surgery, pure and simple.

— Chila Woychik

Sunset and evening star hunching and bending sleeping and slipping virus pneumonia coughing and crying hope in the small things heaven looks brighter aching and falling earth is still darkness slip into sleeping sleeping of death dead now and buried cold now and crumbling dust now and hope-filled heaven is hope (and loneliness lingers in those left behind)

— Chila Woychik

The no-booze rule is one of several shams perpetuated by certain religious groups, presumably to keep their flocks in line. After all, what’s a shepherd to do with drunk sheep? So take your medicine, but leave the booze on the shelf. We have a label to keep, and it’s not Jack Daniel's. Don’t mourn for me. Just tell me what to do rather than teach me what to be. Slam another pill, pop that one last sedative…you’ll find me in the kitchen, washing my glass.

— Chila Woychik

The Page awaits the Inspiration even as Inspiration roams the world of man, seeking a Page upon which to unfurl itself, body and soul, bare yet clothed in immortality if not immediacy. And the gods said, “Let there be a Page, and many a Page,” and there was a Book. And we saw that the Book was good.

— Chila Woychik

The setting sun threatened to consume me—it could have, you know. It would have been a beautiful death with an honorable eulogy: slain by a magnificent slice of piercing orange energy. I simply turned and walked away; I would live another day.

— Chila Woychik

The unrelenting grip of Soldier’s Syndrome slips finger by slow finger. The marrow’s been affected—emotional leukemia at the deepest level. Transplants of love and friendship aid healing, yet time is still key, and the clock never ticks fast enough. Eternity gains perspective when seconds feel like years. How long have I been gone? Six eternities and counting.

— Chila Woychik