Diseased

They call it autoimmune

As if it were natural, mechanical, involuntary.

It sounds too cold.

The first day I became a definition, a stethoscope searched me

as my reflection oozed out beneath blinding white light, 

body crinkling in tissue paper that could wrap a gift.

But what the doctors found inside was not mine. 

But I couldn’t relinquish it. 

They didn’t know what to say but

“ulcerative colitis.”

A needle pricked my skin, pierced the soft pastel 

sunrise of my arm—a forced aurora.

That was the first time.

After months of extracting rubies, my mine was empty

but scarred. By jabs punctures screwdrivings

of strangers with daggers, strangers with daggers in white coats 

blue shoes squeaky clean who are just helping you, sweetie, 

by gifting me with a phobia of anything sharp.

I was an ashen ghost in a wheelchair, torso suddenly deemed

too weak to hold the heart thudding at the speed of lightning. 

But I had been calling it quits even before I was fed Play-Doh 

food on plastic trays. I think, somewhere far away,

I had killed myself.

The squeaky clean blue shoes white coats call it an it,

as if the disease were an entity of itself

as if I were just a vessel carrying this being—

this God—

in a pregnancy etching its story

dozens of trimesters too deep.

The white coats ordered the tears to stop 

the same way they ordered tests and pills, 

pencil scratching hot paper, checklists smeared. 

So I tried chewing the inside of my lip instead. 

But I forgot how to swallow the red.

Now they have begun to put me away,

tuck me to sleep during the day.

A thick powder sneaks through thin

silver tubes, kissing me goodnight.

That is all it takes to get me to shut up.

In those cold, humid moments 

before gloved fingers press my eyelids close, adrenaline

pounds through me like the gallons of freshly brewed 

wine rushing out of the oozing ulcers that grow

like my dark, tangled hair.

What the white coats don’t know is that there is so much 

they don’t know. I am not a mystery. I am not their culprit.

I am a child whose tears run down the lining of her colon, 

not her cheeks.

What they don’t know is that my body isn’t attacking itself.

That my cells aren’t butchers. That I don’t want to die.

What they don’t know is that there is a puppeteer

who has made a stage of my colon, who puts on shows 

whenever suits him best. He doesn’t know to ask me first.

What they don’t know is that his loud music and the trills

in his singsong voice aren’t deafening. What they don’t know

is that the convulsions in his booming laughter,

that even the blood

hurts

less than being locked between grey walls

less than being excavated

less than being called diseased.

What they don’t know

is that in those molten, melting 

moments after they press my eyelids

closed, I can still cry. 

I can still remember the times 

when my skin was soft and smooth

when my greatest fear was heights

when I didn’t believe in bodies 

melting away like rain—

when I was still a child.

And I miss those times.

So I let the flashbacks sing,

as loud and clear as they need to,

in the meat of my dark, wet eyes.

What they can’t know

is that maybe, just maybe,

the holes in my body

aren’t gaps to be filled,

but maybe they are wishing wells,

waiting for a little, thirsty face to peer down

and just smile