From the Front Lines

From the Front Lines

“I am my best work — a series of road maps, reports,

recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.”

— Audre Lorde

“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of — to think; Well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others … and this self, having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”

—Virginia Woolf,

To the Lighthouse

1

Would Virginia Woolf approve of the attachments I have shed? Like a child plucking off Mr. Potato Head accessories, ears, noses, eyes, eyebrows? I shed relationships. Those three words absolutely pale when I review, usually reluctantly, all the love, all the self, I poured into marriages that ended. I like to joke that if I hadn’t been married three times I might have written three more novels. A marriage is a story you tell yourself, and storytelling energy is not infinite.

2

Lest I be accused of burying the lede, in September 2022 I was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer.

3

More than 100 years ago, Germans coined the term öhrwurm — ear worm — to describe the experience of  a song stuck in the brain. Neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks said, “This is a special form of involuntary musical imagery which is out of control and can become quite unpleasant and intrusive.”  Since my diagnosis I wake up every morning with the following simplistic refrain: I have cancer. It verges on the musical due to repetition throughout the day and a slight uptick in pitch on the syllable “cer.” CanCER. A silly sitcom voice. Don’t hang up on me yet, dear reader.

This is not another cancer narrative.

It’s a life story in edible bites.

I inhabit memory.

4

Mark Doty writes, “Detail redeems memory: even an uncertain time, a poor one, yields at least the tangle of bittersweet over the grid of fence.” The fat B-cells crowd out the red cells like blow-hards shoving to the front of a line. Goldfinches swarm into my stand of sunflowers, gorging on the seeds. My sleep schedule has morphed into 4 hours on, then possibly two, then breakfast, then another hour on the sofa. It’s been like this for so long that I take it for granted. I don’t tell a doctor for fear of hearing, “Give up coffee.” Coffee is my only vice. After years of ice cream, butter, LSD, marijuana, gin-and-tonics, margaritas, the wrong men, dangerous sex, Twix bars, and cigarettes, coffee is my only vice. Every morning I drink one espresso strength cup of Dark Star, from a roaster in Harrisburg. The name “Dark Star” makes me feel seduced by a burgeoning cult. It is my writer’s talisman, what gets me to the desk.

5

A famous poet died recently. Scorching star, burnt out. We had a brief affair in the late 1980s. He was older by decades. It started in late fall and then I went to Montana for the holiday break. Did I ski? Were there mountains? What romance — the West —beckoned me to Bozeman where only the most ephemeral wafer of my being danced in the hall, danced in the kitchen. There was usually Lena Horne or Linda Ronstadt or the Mills Brothers singing. No one there knew him. How odd that seemed. My heart moved in the shape of a map. Deep in my real body, the one that seizes whatever’s next — no small gesture — I spent the late nights in Bozeman recalling Chicago, brick interior walls, a Gauguin show, his handhold, rushing from painting to painting, whispering his life, the life of Gauguin mattered to us, how like our own, the foolhardy courage of voyages and young girls and selling his belongings. It was cold. At a thrift store he bought me a bright blue hat. In the Polish restaurant the steam and clatter loved us. Those heavy mugs loved us. And the regulars, the way they shouted. I think they were shouting about football and the mayor. For about five minutes we wanted to be regulars. And the waitress, blond, pimpled, but cheerfully so — she told me how long it took her to grow out her bangs. How she almost gave up. She encouraged me. We didn’t have much money. A twenty-dollar bill. And he said, the famous poet said, Let’s pretend it’s the old days and see how far we get on this. I’ve seldom been in just one place. In the mountains the streets are always calling. This is not a blessing. Two trees, their terrible limbs ash white, scratch the sky over a man walking his sad black dog. The woman with him stops and checks out the stars. I remember the words he told me to remember: a little light left. Even then we thought about my outliving him. What racks, what restless history: we brought every lover we ever had into our mutual night. All those people of our embraces and goodbyes swayed in that little light, chorus of veterans, of outlaws. We were into the rum. His fingers brushing his father’s gravestone, the grainy streets alive for just that day within the fleeting lock of our arms. Once I asked him, “What’s the difference between being your age and my age?” He said, “I live in memory more.”

And now I do that, too.

Tangle of bittersweet/grid of fence.

Patricia Henley’s fifth collection of short stories, Apple & Palm, was published by Cornerstone Press in 2026. She is the author of three novels, five collections of stories, two chapbooks of poetry, and a stage play. Her first novel, Hummingbird House, was a finalist for The National Book Award and The New Yorker Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and other journals. Her first collection of stories, Friday Night at Silver Star, won the Montana First Book Award. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Circle of Women, The Last Best Place, and other anthologies. For 26 years she taught in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Purdue University.