Illness can make the ill either monstrous or invisible. Monster, from the Latin monere (to warn): a foretelling or harbinger or omen. Those of us still visibly sick are some of the last remaining communiques of the consequences of infection, in an era when media rarely reports prevalence data and personal protective measures are discouraged or disallowed. In the US, about 4.4 in every 100,000 people were hospitalized for COVID-19 the week of August 17 and national wastewater data remains “very high”. The risk is not muted, only the messaging. We are often unwelcome in community because we are a metonymy of the larger threat people prefer to ignore; our full participation requires adjustments the world is not willing to make.
The first writing I did in illness that was not medical documentation or emergency procedures or pleas to loved ones was monster poems. Speculative poetry, as Romie Stott, Poetry Editor for Strange Horizons describes it, is not defined by it’s form or method, subject or audience, but by a feeling or a set of references: “Poetry’s intense, elevated language lends itself to the exploration of larger-than-life—or the profoundly intimate. It scales up to eternity and down to the subatomic. This provides, perhaps, a working definition for speculative poetry: it is poetry on a scale that is not merely human.” Domenica Martinello and I took this last phrase (“a scale not merely human”) as the title of a speculative poetry panel for the ill-fated March 2020 Growing Room festival.
In my form requirements for myself, the Monster Poem deploys:
1-3 sharp turns in both narrative and layout, to dizzy the reader.
Piled synonyms and metaphors and misspoken cliches, stacked like 301 eyelashes on a drag queen, to mimic the brain pulling phrases out of broken neural retrieval pathways.
Indented stanzas to look askance at content the speaker cannot face head-on or to look backwards into traumatic memory, the poem’s many eyes averted or seated so intimately close to the monster you cannot fully comprehend it, paw in hand.
Speculative elements: the monster is a metaphor and also not a metaphor. Real, realized monsters — creatures that walk the page in daylight — and ‘invisible monster’ tropes — the monstrous, scary, exhilarating, risky things we cannot bear to look at head on.
I wrote monsters you could take dancing, dressed like something untouched and unspeakable — a growl in the night. Monsters that curled around you like a service pet sensing blood loss, tail ringing your feet to keep the pack together. Monsters grown too big for their basket, a grievance of bruises hugging their clumsy width, an apology permanently in their mouth for the day’s broken glass. I wrote sea monsters and lake monsters and monsters so dehydrated they napped in the dishwasher. Monsters (re?)learning how to be human, as confused about cooking as I was.
I wrote myself as monster, the monster as illness, monster as pet or predator or lover, company and comfort, hallucination and haunting, how something physically imposing is either threat or object of lust to our monkey brains. Too sick to write cogent prose in any form, I slipped small monster poems into my own pockets and that of my lovers like talismans against my own monstrosity. I wrote even when I went silent in all other realms, hoping a chorus of monsters would speak for me.
Neuroimmunological illness in particular can shut a patient up: disembowel speech or render the outside world physically and communicatively unreachable. The most sick amongst us the least able to describe it; their bodies unable to spare the breath for words or tolerate the cognitive labour of finding them. I spent much of the spring unravelling from fresh illness, pausing this essay series and being more careful with my words for fear I’d burn the bridges I was standing on; spent the summer rebuilding my strength and vocabulary til I could safely breach my own walls and explain what had happened to those willing to listen. When you withdraw into silence, it can feel like if you broach it at all, your defences will crumble, any principled stance you take disarmed by your own monstrous mouth. The opposite of slow burn romance is a searing — when you both know you want and will burn the house down if you allow yourselves to look.
The Impairing Curse is a long-form, serialized experiment in personal essay, science journalism, policy analysis, and poetry. To start at the beginning and read it in order, go to the first essay or read about the aesthetics and labour of illness, the science of salt, and the failures of public health. To support this project, share it online or subscribe. The series is intentionally not behind a paywall, to ensure broad access to patients and timely circulation of information in our evolving public health crisis, but paid subscriptions are welcome.
I've just read Hydration Lesson! Brava! I am this monster. Since the age of 18, I have been perpetually thirsty. Since having and learning all about post-viral illnesses thanks to long COVID, I realize that it started post-Epstein-Barr. Thank you.
I love this so much.