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WGI Writer M.S. Marquart has shared her poetry for National ME Awareness Month!

We are thrilled to highlight one of our talented WGI Writers: M.S. Marquart! She participated in workshops with our partner, #MEAction Network.

M. S. Marquart is a disabled, mixed race Asian American writer whose poetry explores the impacts of chronic illness, disability, and the issues that intersect with them. She seeks to shed light on the hidden daily lives of the millions of people with long covid and myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME, ME/CFS), who are often home-bound and missing from society, suffering from disabilities that currently have no cure.

Below is one of her many poems, “Existence while hoping for a cure (#MillionsMissing). Published in Lombardi Voices (Volume 21, Winter 2024), pages 42-43. Find more of her work here.

May is National ME Awareness Month. ME/CFS or myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome is a complex chronic disease that presents with symptoms in multiple body systems.

Take action here.

"Existence while hope for a cure (#MillionsMissing)" by M.S. Marquart:

Lying on the couch in in somnolent twilight,
the same days repeat,
over and over.

Ever a tyrant, my ME/CFS
dictates only watching television I’ve already seen before.
My brain fog commands no distress from trying to keep up
with plot points. My anxiety insists on no nerves over whether characters will die.
My fatigue demands no stress when it sends me to sleep mid-episode 
and auto-play continues on. My light sensitivity imposes 
curtains closed, lights off, screen brightness dimmed.

I select a soothing rhythm
of problems solved.
A quirky female-male pair investigating crimes over many seasons.
Women who can fight,
who can survive anything.
Series that pass the Bechdel Test.
Elementary. Bones. The Mentalist, Lucifer. 
I watch each one from start to finish
and back to start, at .75 speed when possible. 

I see nothing new, I feel nothing new.
The same shows from the past repeat,
over and over. The same mysteries are solved, 
over and over.
Time has frozen.

Noteworthy

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