For the Day of My Vaccine Injury (written exactly 4 years after the event)

You were the demon that slipped into my life
like a well-developed bomb.

I was already half-dead, having slipped halfway
across the veil when they removed the oxygen
from my father's mouth,
after the long labor of watching his spirit untangle itself
from the heave of his lungs.
A part of me followed him into that great release,
the uncorking.

So when you came around, the day after,
the day I had my appointment to be a responsible citizen of the world,
and when the pharmacist pressed the cold drug into my shoulder,
--though my shoulder spit it out at first--
I had no reserves to stop her when she shoved it back in,
saying “Oops, how strange.”

They were floating like clouds in the night,
with my father's spirit, in the shape of a mushroom cloud over the city.
So, boundaryless, my body exploded in convulsive shudders.
Would you ask a funeral party to put up arms?

The pain and panic that built up over days after
was such that I wished to go all the way,
as he had, to leave the inflamed carcass behind.

But I was caught—half here, half there--
not alive, but not dead either.
A hellish existence,
where one torture led to another
and wall after wall
was torn down inside of me.

You were the day I cursed,
the day that chased me like a rabid monster,
whose eyes glared red at night
and whose venom dulled my days
until I wondered if I were even really here
or if I'd slipped into the place where haunted spirits drift
circling round an endless drain
at the cusp of oblivion.

You kidnapped my spirit.
You raped my body.
You ensnared my life.

You showed me where I was missing.
You showed me the edges of gaping holes
which had followed me,
invisible, for years.

In the glare of your sight
I saw the victim in me.
I saw the woman who despised her weakness,
who cursed the fact
of being made of bone
and tissue.

The one who confused resilience
with permanence
and life
with remaining intact.

Now I bow before you.

Because you became the portal that freed me
from these lies.

The eye of the Universe looked through
the mushroom cloud of my scattered spirit that day
and fixed its unwavering gaze upon the center of my cells,
brazen with light--
even as they closed and braced
against the world and its tonnage
of earth-bound pain.

The ear of the Universe waited, silent
for the moment, weeks later,
when I would stop resisting desperation,
stop hiding the fact
that I am powerless
in the best of ways
against the Greatness,
the moment I opened
from the bone-chilling base of my spine
from the reptile in me
and unhinged a scream of a prayer
so honest
so carnal
so primal
so hungry
so feral
so surrendered
to the needs of the body
that the hungry ghost in me rose up
into the night
like an ugly angel
whose wet wings were birthing
from a tarry chrysalis.

The heart of the Universe
moved then, like a glimmer,
in black waters.

Something freed itself from the buried hell
I'd carried, we'd carried, we still carry...

Something moved its flukes for the first time
in eons, having remembered the light.

And though the restitching was arduous,
and seemed to take forever,
though it was a great crushing weight
atop the ego that had carried me thus far through this life,
I would not trade the gift
you brought me:

to learn the art of dying
within a life,
the alchemy of burning
so thoroughly
to the tap root of ancestral DNA
coils where spirit and matter braid
like lovers
to crack shells of generational debris
to stir an agency
so potent
it transcends the divide
between earth
and heaven,
to remember
not just in idea
but in marrow
and plasma:
the eternal creature that I am.