Little Lamb, Who Made Thee

by Anne Boyer

The pathology report was terrifying. It said the primary tumor was ugly: highly aggressive triple negative breast cancer, necrotic, reproducing at a rate beyond fast. And my friends, many of them poets, most too young to know what to do--who hadn't even really taken care of sick parents yet--had to invent a new something (art? politics?) that could keep someone (me) alive and safe through all that.

My friend Laura came from Oakland for the second chemo. We went to the woods and I shook my head, pulled out hair by the handfuls, let the dying hair float away for birds. Then my friend Cara came over and we cut most of the rest of my hair off, cut Laura's hair, too, and collected some of the hair in locks tied with ribbons to give our friends, drove around with the rest of it for hours, leaving handfuls in parking lots and banks and intersections.

I wanted to stay upright through the waves of sickness in the days after a treatment, so Laura and I began a collaboration. We studied every text of radical illness we could find, read Socialist Patients Collective while I was burning with steroids, pain, chemotherapy's other inventive tortures, my skin cracking, my mouth opening into sores, my stomach brutally churning, worked on what we called "a communique from the exurban outpost of a cancer pavilion named after a financier." Some anarchists came over with a tool and fixed the messed up leg on my kitchen table.

Read the full essay on the Poetry Foundation website.