I am unsure if you can hold the weight of this.
I remember the crunch of
tearing a baby tooth out.
Even as my stomach contorted
I thought:
I can, with brute force, mold this body.
That old venom—
the horror of inhabiting a body bound to fail
when the body pulses with dysfunction,
venom rises as bile.
Do not swallow.
My invisible disability
curled within my worn-out cells
cuts both ways.
I must rummage through my body for proof:
Here are my pill packets my sweat-stained shirt
see the doctor’s bill my aching spine the bitter back of my throat.
I am accumulating small losses. My condition exceeds definition and resists being quantified. I lie coddled between bedsheets. I must stretch my skin taut
try to distinguish symptom from prophecy
I will tell you all of it.
Do not squirm, you want to know.
The university barks for proof—it tries to be very soft, almost pleading—and I writhe under 3 day requests for medical documents and an overly intimate diary of vomit and sweat.
Go on, they can take this too:
I solemnly and sincerely declare to the University of Sydney
that I make this declaration conscientiously believing its contents to be true.
I confess: I take medication I don’t know the purpose of
I line them up by colour and bitter aftertaste
this small shame is forced into abstraction—
a 20-minute consultation
a document, an attempt to phrase exhaustion professionally
and an email that ends please help
I have forgotten how to spell.
I watch the blinking cursor in the service portal as I fall asleep.
An unending email chain snakes down my spine—my palms turning cold
quietly, I am slipped between case numbers and am left there (un)resolved.
Again, I dream that my teeth fall out (this is a dream about control).
I read over the dentist’s notes: Your gums are receding. You must floss. You have one baby tooth left with no replacement. I trace my tongue around it.
I obsessively Google gum disease and parse through WebMD.
We — and by ‘we’ I mean everyone — defer the fear of disintegration and baulk at the broken. The gruesome fact of the natural body has been parcelled into elderly care homes and period tracking apps.
There was a river, so we built a dam.
There were symptoms, so I recorded them.
5:03am: Writing about disability in my notes app while I throw up in the toilet from fatigue — I must buy more toilet cleaner — I’m going to force myself to write 3000 words on social movement theory (I am spilling over).
This relentless datafication will save no one.
One day the dam will flood
tracking your protein won’t save you
throw your Fitbit to the mud.
I settle back into a world of my own making
I bare my teeth, refusing this body
playing symptom roulette
I dance stiffly in a sticky bar until my muscles unspool.
My hot forehead is pressed against floor tile and
spit is soaking into the grout.
So what? You can’t stop me
(maybe I’m trying to revive my lost teenage years with this attitude)
I try not to faint when I wake up
I sit across from my grandmother (no teeth, all dentures). We trade in aches and diagnoses.
She lowers herself haltingly into the chair. There I am: fractured and refracted in her. I wonder if I offer enough support. We haven’t shared this body long enough. I make her tea (always too strong). We get dizzy, sip silently.
When my baby tooth falls out,
there will be nothing to replace it.
I leave myself sleeping, curled up on my side
my dreams slip past my body, I am hollowed out.
This is what is left:
I used to wade through uncut fields
stamping my feet to rouse the sleeping snakes
now in my dream
my tooth rests in my palm
my abdomen hugs the curve of the road
still warm
and I braid the long grass
you must flinch against it
until it hurts
you must swallow it whole.
I used to wade through uncut fields
stamping my feet to rouse the sleeping snakes
now in my dream
my abdomen hugs the curve of the road
and I braid the long grass
until it hurts.
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