There’s Something Wrong With Me, She Said
But her parents ignored her. The doctors did tests and shook
their head and said she’d be dead by thirty.
She’d never get out of her wheelchair.
There’s something wrong, but maybe it’s that I just don’t fit in here.
You see, I was born with wings and a tail and a fury and a flail,
and I wasn’t born to sit in chairs or be nice and just while away the years.
When I was born, there was an ill wind, a wicked spell gone wrong;
you couldn’t know what you had begun, what you had brought home.
It wasn’t cancer it wasn’t MS the lesions the tumors the missing organs
the blood the abnormal cells the aches to be something else somewhere else.
It was that she was not born human that this body wasn’t even mine,
that trapped inside was a monster or a mutant or some kind of dragon
who doesn’t fit well into suits and doesn’t fold her hands
and never ever looks back; her eyes are fire and her skin ten degrees too hot.
Her throat burns her hands her spine all of it aflame.
What did you think you were seeing?
You misread the signs. You could not trace the signal.
She laughs and all around her everything ignites.
Before Going to the Infusion Center
I lie nervous, watching home renovation shows
and Rear Window
simultaneously.
I am the home being torn apart,
dismantled to remove hidden horrors.
I am the man
watching from a wheelchair,
and the wife buried under the flower bed,
and the dog murdered for knowing too much.
Too nervous to do much
besides pack the “emergency kit,” with Benadryl,
a book, a blanket.
To sit in the infusion center
is to come face to face with yes, death,
but with others more broken than you,
people younger, people perhaps better than you are,
who deserve their fate even less.
Will I be able to evade the murderer in time,
will I be the house with new countertops and hardwood floors,
so shiny you’d never know about the dry rot
and knob-and-tube wiring, asbestos and bees
hidden under old paint?
Anyway, wish me luck, wish me a chance
to become the host of new antibodies,
so I may become a new kind of movie,
a superheroine who gets her power
from mutation and gene migration.
After an Appointment With a Disability Therapist
I am praised by how adaptable, persistent, and driven
I am—an American dream of what disabled people
should be, pleasant and uncomplaining.
I think to myself how few choices we have in life
to be heroic: to run into a burning building,
or dramatically bring someone back to life.
But heroism can be smaller; kindness to a stray
dog or child, for instance, or pivoting from one
disappointment to another—to be told at 19,
I will not have a child, or at 20, I will not be able
to be a doctor, after all (“disableds” have a hard
time with med-school schedules, after all…)
or to be given one shockingly rare diagnosis after another,
that in time, becomes less shocking.
That we still wake up, wash our faces, put on lipstick,
face the day as brave as an American flag on top of a cake,
even though we are bleeding, we are in pain, we are so nauseous
we can barely stand—are these things almost superhuman? If so,
I need a cane that hides a laser beam and a costume
that will cover my thin calves, a magic therapy flying horse
to deliver me to each day as I get older, as I give one more
impossible thing a try. As I set my force fields to “stun.”
As I make another miraculous day happen,
whether the sun shines on me or not.
Jeannine Hall Gailey (she/her) is a poet with MS who served as Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She’s the author of six books of poetry, including Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and the SFPA’s Elgin Award, and her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, a finalist for the Washington State Book Award.
Her work has appeared in journals like The American Poetry Review, JAMA, Ploughshares, and Poetry.
Website: www.webbish6.com
Twitter: @webbish6
Threads: @webbish6
Instagram: @webbish6
Bluesky: @webbish6.bsky.social