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My Life, In Your Hands

 

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











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Praisesong for the People

a project by Amanda Johnston 

2024 Texas State Poet Laureate 

This project is made possible with support from the Academy of American Poets, the Mellon Foundation, the Writers' League of Texas, and the Texas Commission on the Arts. 

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