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NAMED | Cammie Fuller
They began by calling her Patient.
Slicing nodes from the wells beneath her shoulders.
Then they called her Strong.
When she sat down on the faded red love seat and said “I’m fine”
before losing herself to the cold Mexican tile.
They wrote Survivor, when they asked her to walk ten miles
wearing pink ribbons and a sign on her back
so, she motored her calm body along the wide avenues of Washington DC
and whispered, “I am alive, call me alive,
my name is Alive.”
But at the turn of fifteen years, they called her Victim.
For fifteen years she chose “what next” and “what now” until the response
became the indent of our knees in the soil beside her.
We chose “hero” as we watched the regrowth of green grass
around the space from which it had been removed.
And they called her Deceased.
But it was she who
divided uncontrollably.
She who spread like wildfire.
She who held pieces of herself in the cuff of her elbow,
and the bend of her knee and carried them
through old growth forests and over moss-softened boulders.
She who held her body tall before the oncoming storm,
and inhaled the salt of the sea saying, no, bellowing,
“I am alive, call me alive, my name is Alive.”
Cammie Copps Fuller is a poet and owner of an indie bookshop, The Open Book, in Warrenton, Virginia. Fuller has published multiple poems in Taproot and Poets Reading the News and she has a children's book releasing in September 2025. Fuller leads writing groups through her shop with the intention of building community and encouraging expression through the written word.