My contribution to Suffering the Silence includes three poems: one ode and two epistolary poems.
“Ode” is dedicated to a cherished loved one who has guided me through the endless challenges of chronic illness, fatigue, and despair in the face of the medical industrial complex.
“Illness Epistle no. 1” addresses the grief that many ill and disabled people wrestle with through their entire lives. This a strange grief that is not widely recognized or supported and is compounded by the reality of ableism in late-stage capitalism.
“Illness Epistle no. 2” is about visiting the AIDS Memorial Quilt on a high school field trip, which was a devastating experience that I would later understand to be my first exposure to queer and trans ancestry. This poem attempts to confront the heartbreak and violent alienation I experienced as a queer teenager during this trip, surrounded by many openly bigoted peers and teachers in a rural and widely conservative environment.
Ode
My guide of fascia, vials
of blood, wraps of heat
or ice.
For already fostering awe
before the arrival of quiet
grief, so that I still looked
out for the circling hawk, the
bloom of thistle.
If only gratitude could be
less like a portrait
and more like a boat,
sturdy and quiet
through a swamp of cypress.
Illness Epistle no. 1
Dear reverberation of myself,
tiny pink shorts of glitter
refracting leaps,
dances of push and pull
with beautiful women.
Forever ready and wanting
improvisation. Consumed
in the creation of surprise, unaware
when a room came to stillness
around us.
This self before fibromyalgia:
I cobble what’s left of you,
lupine and cattails.
Tied together with involuntary
comparisons,
neglected drafts,
shredded ribbon
from the bottom drawer.
Outside, there is no record, no
recognition of you, not a single
proven explanation
of the invisible wreckage.
Some days I manage
to leave you in the bed,
bewildered. Half-formed.
Walk just to wear myself out
before sunset.
I tire of mourning you.
I-87 North is a straight shot
through the Adirondack Mountains
to Montreal.
In cool and empty midnight,
I can only see twenty feet ahead.
All evergreen and pine.
I lose all sense of distance.
Two lanes, a shoulder, the exits becoming sparse/Trees and road an unending tunnel I do not remember entering/I am speeding and winding/ I can’t/feel my hands/There is someone else here/in the passenger
seat/I have to keep them safe/I think I am screaming/This isn’t an ending I dreamed/The tunnel is unending/There is nothing but forward.
Somehow I make it to the shoulder,
late summer air rushes me back
into my body.
This is where I want to bury you:
an anonymous mountain I can’t circle back to.
Leave you to be pulled apart.
Let the mushrooms find you,
become useful
for the pine and evergreen.
Illness Epistle no. 2
Schuylerville High School Field Trip
AIDS Memorial Quilt
Albany Convention Center
2005
I am 30
weeping at my desk, over the sink.
Neither of us can crawl away.
One day, you’ll meet queer adults
who aren't already dead.
Together, you’ll relish
in your enemies’ disgust,
you beautiful degenerate.
I’m sorry.
It doesn’t get better.
You learn how to punch harder.
You are 15
choking in the aisles, spitting up gold.
arrived already hating Amerikkka.
The walls of cloth do not end.
Bristle gray carpet, no corners.
Too cold
to wait outside.
You’ve been forced to wander alone
in an indoor graveyard.
Your ancestors do not come to hold your hand.
I’m sorry.
Rae Willem Henaghan (he/him) is a nonbinary poet and chronically ill agitator living on stolen land known as "Richmond, Virginia." He has previously worked in publishing, which included working with incarcerated people pursuing college education through the publisher's prison education program. He believes in the radical possibilities of disabled liberation through abolition and anti-capitalism. IG: sick.boyfriend