June 2026 - Vol. 23, Issue 3

Sometimes I don’t know how to separate my M.E.

from the violence that left it growing in my body

an unwanted, destined never to bear, pregnancy

a horror vivisecting me, this child no changeling

This illness that left me with undesired regularity

wrapped round my womb to run it like clockwork

as if I ever planned to birth anything from there

the pain cutting through me, blinding at its worst

Brambles and thorns choking out the natives

growing inside my lungs planted by betrayal

to an illness I was desperate to be protected from

I was already vulnerable. I was already vulnerable.

But as violent as the coming was, my M.E. is me

even as the vestiges of this fell virus still rend

my battered lungs and twirl tornadoes across

the neurons that ought to be closely intertwined

Loving myself means I have to love me with my M.E.

I have never faltered in love of this disabled body

I have adored the cane turned to rollator turned

to gifted wheelchair, I have loved me bedbound

It has not been more difficult to accept my M.E.

because it is ‘more severe.’ It is harder because of

the treachery, the sorrow, the fear, since the ones

who infected me received the care I am still denied

But they cannot harm me anymore because my body

is mine to protect, to love, to shield, to deny them

and when this chronic fatigue has blessed me with

the most wonderful community, I cannot hate M.E.

I will never believe that the covid that disabled me

was inevitable as those who built that Trojan horse

told me that it must be, but I have learned that it is

not a living hell on earth, since love is other people

To be alive at all is a miracle. the perfiidy had cut

me so sharply that there were days I wished that

I had died, my body dissected for science, buried

the way that they all wanted to bury their guilt

In the first year most days i didn’t want to live

I only stayed because I believed i was needed

as a warning against unmasking but that was

no way to live a life, no way to know a miracle

I yearned that there might come a day for me

when I would finally be free of hurt, that those

who love me would act to protect me without

being begged and without constant reminders

And I have found them, in spaces online where

I don’t have to mind illness as my vulnerability,

from friends who show up, N95 on or in hand,

from my love too who masks across the ocean

And when I feel soft orange fur under my skin

and see Stoo’s cat climbing beneath a blanket,

bum shoved directly in his face, as he reads

I feel so giddily alive, and the world is alright

To hear your poetry is to hear the beauty in mine

to see you propped up on pillows like a reflection

a mirror of myself, to know that we do not have

to sit to be heard, nor always to read to be writers

To know others with M.E. is to love each one

From the wholeness of me. And I have learned

that it is to love myself, to love my M.E. too,

to sing, to read though it’s harder to breathe

Tongue swollen but my heart is big enough

that I nearly don’t notice it or my tightened

throat because these words need to leave it

so I can tell you how much you mean to me

Because this is not to say there is no horror

as I join you on these pillow dates from bed

and I write poems like love letters to be read

but to be alive is a miracle, and it is enough