after Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Once I was slave, then I was an Alabama woman,
a hushed experiment hidden between the damp thighs
of Tuskegee men. Too many times I was a newborn
next to my mother in LA General County Hospital,
her slick syllables said something in Spanish, something
in English, something about sterility, something about tubes.
I am plump and soft and have not always had this hair—
always damaged. Always ruined, sent away to be fixed and corrected.
I am America’s opaque shadow, tossed
like a dog rotting on every country roadside.
I’ve been HeLa cells passed around like Halloween candy.
Are the doctors still waiting
for their black offering? Me, a silk dress of skin?
Consider this:
each moment I am perched on an examination table
is my break, diseased heart, taken child.
This is how I feel: wide. Dark. Lumpy. Cotton
at the bottom of a pillowcase. My cartilage
has been trustworthy in its it’s role,
how it performs it’s designed duty,
how it keeps fastened my flesh
to my bone. If I could be more
than a specimen, more than a collection
of daffodils, flora would mean I was not here.
Don’t you see? I am still here on all fours.
I was never bone, nor beast, nor symbol for suffering.
I am a compass for warnings, a cured tissue.
They are still dressing me for the cut
and I prep for the familiar
cold gauze turned warm, then wet, then red.
From American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press, 2018) by Nandi Comer. Copyright © 2018 Nandi Comer. Reprinted by permission of the author.