This Broken Vessel

Run your fingers over the surface–
read my pain like Braille.
My life is written in scars across
my skin, my organs.

Spinal meningitis scrawled
itself across my coccyx.
Two dots, spinal punctures.
Eighteen months old.

Tiny dimples on left instep and
beside right eye, dainty kisses
from chickenpox–they are
my special favorites.

See those starry scars where
I once had tonsils–cut from me
after months of strep. PANDAS
left me with buckshot brain scars.

Invisible, but they scream in seizure.

The firedream fever that nearly
left me cold in soil at eight years old–
see the grooves it left across
frontal cortex, across spleen.

The liver is a roadmap, a topography
of some ancient river delta. This old
battlefield, where wolf and bat and I fight.
Graffiti running the length of heavy flesh

as we each tag what territory is ours.

Lupus stares at me in the mirror
from behind my own eyes.
The wolf rises up in my cheeks,
buoyed by screaming bat.

The bat eats my liver, visits me
as faithfully as Prometheus’
eagles. Blisters my skin and thins
my blood. Oh, unholy porphyria!

Poppy has never friended me–
white milk of red flowers
leaves marks all of its own.
Red rash, swollen tongue,

and fire of the brain.

And so I crawl in skin carved
and stretched and marked.
I am the opus of Pestilence.
This body belongs in a museum–

the Mutter, specifically.

– S. E. De Haven

For this contest: https://allpoetry.com/contest/2801345-Infections–Personal—17

The Mutter Museum, if you’ve never heard of it, is a museum of medical oddities. https://collegeofphysicians.org/our-work/mutter-museum