THEME: On Amputation

 

The Georgia Review congratulates Rochelle L. Johnson, who was selected by judge Allegra Hyde as the winner of the Georgia Review Prose Prize. | March 2025

Of Johnson’s essay, Hyde wrote: 

“Reading ‘Phantom Pains,’ I couldn’t stop highlighting lines. The essay offers such profundity, such wisdom, through frank and compassionate engagement with uncertainty, unknowingness, and grief. Weaving together the experience of amputation with the experience of teaching in the face of a devastating and unrelenting environmental crisis, ‘Phantom Pains’ takes readers on the journey of enduring loss, but also of rebuilding community and connection. I finished the essay feeling both moved and inspired. ‘I had decided that I would no longer mask my own vulnerability,’ writes the author towards the essay’s conclusion, ‘as my students do the work of facing their own.’ As a fellow teacher, a fellow human being as well, ‘Phantom Pains’ made me want to do the hard work of revealing some of my own vulnerabilities, as a way of contributing to collective efforts to heal ourselves and our planet. I hope that other readers will feel the same.”

GEORGIA REVIEW

“I moved west when I was barely an adult and no longer whole. I left behind a limb in an east-coast surgical ward . . .”

—Excerpt from Where Ashes Bloom. Contest Winner. The Baltimore Review (Summer 2023)

“Where Ashes Bloom”

“I moved west when I was barely an adult and no longer whole. I left behind a limb in an east-coast surgical ward, saying goodbye to a body part and to my own completeness. Amputation forces a farewell.

As I entered southwest Idaho, the evening air hung thick with alfalfa’s scent. Other fields grew mustard and mint—more peppery bitterness. Outside the fields and away from the river, trees and meadows were scarce. Sagebrush and prickly creosote whispered in place of flashing maple and crisp birch. This arid land hardly held the promise of home.

I adjusted to life without my left leg. Sometimes I pictured its remains—flesh incinerated to coarse sand and gray ash, tiny chunks of desiccated bone, the refuse of a heat stronger than desert sun on pale skin…”

 

  • Where Ashes Bloom

    I moved west when I was barely an adult and no longer whole. I left behind a limb in an east-coast surgical ward, saying goodbye to a body part and to my own completeness. Amputation forces a farewell.

    As I entered southwest Idaho, the evening air hung thick with alfalfa’s scent. Other fields grew mustard and mint—more peppery bitterness. Outside the fields and away from the river, trees and meadows were scarce. Sagebrush and prickly creosote whispered in place of flashing maple and crisp birch. This arid land hardly held the promise of home.

    I adjusted to life without my left leg. Sometimes I pictured its remains—flesh incinerated to coarse sand and gray ash, tiny chunks of desiccated bone, the refuse of a heat stronger than desert sun on pale skin.

    When my father visited, he gazed out the car window, quiet at the barren land. Later he spoke softly: “I guess it’s just a different sort of beauty.” Those words stayed. In time I learned to see flaming-orange globe mallow rising from tawny ground and Indian paintbrush bursting crimson under tenacious sage. Balsamroot glowed yellow like blooming buckets of sunshine on rocky hillsides.

    Now, these many years later, the lack of trees still gapes. So does the space where my leg once grew. But in this place where desolation masks fecundity, these absences have become home. Here, emptiness is just another sort of beauty, and wholeness can follow even final farewells.