i say to my friends,
half tongue-in-cheek, half in earnest.
no, it does not shake my faith in data–
too much of my own sense of health,
of body, of self, is built upon the
empirical. i have spent too many
years held up by fluorescent lights and
hospital gowns to not know the power
of modern medicine at a cellular level.
and yet,
to be born into a woman’s body is
to inherit a distance.
a native tongue half the earth
refuses to learn
your autonomous responses
become to breathe, to bleed, and to
translate your pain in a broken english a doctor
will mishear. misinterpret. dismiss.
sometimes, if you are lucky,
you will live long enough for a single study
to bubble. then another. then another.
if you are lucky, you will watch them rise
to the surface, push into the atmosphere, and
point in unison at the very boulder your own
palms have pushed against.
sometimes science is a
man seated next to you,
loudly announcing something
you’ve said all your life,
and you watch as the room
falls at his feet.
CarnivalDark 