^{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.