My, My, My, My, My

by Tara Hardy

Overview

Her fight to stay alive, while terrifying, is deeply vibrant.
Suddenly stricken by a life-threatening condition, the author finds she has slipped into an alternate reality– one in which her life and her livelihood are no longer to be counted on. Oddly, she finds it's a place populated with not just hope, but a newfound appreciation for the splendors of the physical world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938912641
Publisher:	Write Bloody Publishing
Publication date:	11/09/2016
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	138
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Tara Hardy is a working-class, Queer, Femme, chronically ill writer and founder of Bent, a writing institute for LGBTQ people in Seattle. Her most recent book of poems, My, My, My, My, My, won a 2017 Washington State Book Award and explores the links between childhood trauma and chronic illness. She is a former Hugo House Writer in Residence, Seattle Poet Populist, and Hedgebrook alumna. She teaches at Richard Hugo House, Path With Art, and Gay City Arts.

Read an Excerpt

FLEW
Last summer, while the healthy
were out picnicking and dashing
skip-ily across crosswalks, I was making
friends with a spider who had taken
up residence in a corner
outside my window. She was fast
and brutal, would wait for sunset
when the bugs came out and then
pounce. I watched her suck the life
outa the heads of several bees
while I cheered. Until the day a ladybug

clearly out past curfew, started
waddling across the window
towards the web. I considered
tapping on the glass
to warn the lady, but
then I thought, why should just
the pretty survive? Who am I
to re-route fate? So, I did nothing
but watch life dish up life's
terms. Me, sick and brutally
awed in my pink chemotherapy gown
watching as God marched
that lady nine inches two inches three
millimeters away
from the web,
when to my marvel
at the velocity of life,
there in the twilight,
she flew.