Micro Mutant Postcard #62
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
A freak riding my banana bike, my bell bottoms always got stuck in the chains. That sap-turned-syrup smell permeated the air, then, so sweet and familiar. Spider-Man’s theme song buzzed my Mutant brain. I wanted to look out, but I never was a city slicker.
Image description/alt-text: a Daddy Long Legs spider crawling over white hydrangea blossom
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Micro Mutant Postcard #258
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
Greetings, fellow Mutants, the hazy yellow sky warns and warms again, with ominous weight and sensorial proof of Crises of Infinite Earth-like proportions. That roaring dragon always hisses in my ear, telling me to swallow the smoke; this Smaug may not be just a phase.
Image description/alt-text: A hilly landscape at night time with hazy smoke and wildfire flames being blown by wind. Image by Kevin Ellis from Pixabay. Free for commercial use. No attribution required.
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Author Note:
The Micro Mutant Postcard Project is an ongoing endeavor seeking to meld poetry, confessions, memoir, and imagery with pop culture, especially comic books, and identity, including disability, using specific conventions to bring forth creativity and explore intersections the author has perhaps not yet publicly revealed.
Kudos go to Diane Wiener, Stephen Kuusisto, Dan Simpson, Ona Gritz, Minnie-Bruce Pratt, Emily Michaels, and my 2012 Maymester WRT 438 Advanced Creative Nonfiction cohort at Syracuse University, for their contributions to this endeavor.
Select postcards were published as Flash Memoir in the December 2020 issue of Wordgathering; other postcards were published in the Summer 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Summer 2022, Fall 2022 and Summer 2023 issues of Wordgathering, as well as a Micro flash contribution for the “spooky” issue of Stone of Madness Press.
Some postcards are memoir, others manifestos, and many are confessional, either addressed to pop culture figures and characters or written as self-revelations and larger burning or rhetorical life questions.
Read Rachael’s reviews of Disabled People Transforming Media Culture for a More Inclusive World and Season One: Iris and the Crew Tear Through Space!; their essay, “How X-Men’s Beast is My Kindred Spirit, or How I Really Need to Reclaim Blue”; and the Gatherer’s Blog in this issue of Wordgathering.
About the Author
Rachael A. Zubal-Ruggieri (she/her/hers, they/them/theirs) is a long-time employee at Syracuse University. She co-created (with Diane R. Wiener) “Cripping” the Comic Con, the first of its kind interdisciplinary and international symposium on disability and popular culture, previously held at SU. At conferences and as a guest lecturer for many years, Rachael has presented on the X-Men comic books, popular culture, and disability rights and identities from her perspective as a Neurodivergent person and as a Mad Queer Crip. Entries in their “Micro Mutant Postcard Project” have been published in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature and Stone of Madness. Their most recent publications include two articles (co-authored with Diane R. Wiener) in the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies‘ Special Issue, “Cripping Graphic Medicine I: Negotiating Empathy and the Lived Experiences of Disability in and through Comics” (Volume 17, Issue 3).