for Dr. Shervin Assassi
“Illness is the night side of life”
-Susan Sontag
Praise the river in his throat that erodes
even the most pernicious prognosis
into a poem
he gave my pain a name:
systemic sclerosis he called it
the s sliding off his tongue like a salve
rather than a death sentence
I am still a rubber band
flexing and stretching into a future
yet unknown
but I must put my life in his hands
and trust that they will first,
do no harm
Praise his fingertips
for finding the excess collagen that caked
my melanin
how they pulled and pinched
my nose, neck, cheeks and chest
scoring my skin’s elasticity on a scale
of one to four
the higher the number
the less likely I was to live
this was not a game I wanted to win
Praise the dark moons under his eyes
the sleepless nights on call, in the lab,
the books and biopsies, the treatments and
testimonials, the reading and researching
and reminders to me at every visit
that nothing is set in stone
not my skin or his science
Praise the line between his brows
that curled like a question
as the stethoscope lingered between
my shoulder blades and back
he listened to the manic music
behind my breasts
my heartbeat and breath
a skipped bachata stuttering on the inhale
a scratched bolero begging for a break
a twenty-six year old
seconds away from having a stroke
praise the words “you need to go to the ICU”
Praise the X-ray images
he held up to the light to show me the cloud
coverage around my ribcage
how it revealed a hurricane heart
the bayous of my pericardium filling
with flood waters that would soon overflow
and drown me out had he not tornadoed
into the ER and demanded
I get treatment
Praise his “No,”
and all the times it kept me sana y salva
even when it wasn’t what I wanted
to hear:
No, you can’t cut her open
No, you can’t prick her fingers
No, you can’t send her home yet
No, you can’t stop your meds
No, you aren’t in remission
Praise the pin pricks
and blood draws, the lab work
and EKGs, the MRIs and cat scans
the results he read like a folktale
tattooed to the biomarkers in my blood:
my abuela’s grief
Papi’s anger
Mami’s guilt
a chorus of unscripted elegies
that bounced off the walls of my wrists
and rattled the deadbolt doors of my knees and hips
Praise his hands and how
They cracked me open
Once I was an armadillo
my skin so stiff I thought it’d break
but he found the soft tissue
buried beneath the boulders
this illness has made of my body
and bit by bit a little light
creeped in