Chronic illnesses are like dreams, no one wants to hear about them.
by Em Dial
i hear this once, could have been more than once, could have been a dream.
i dream less often now. through the night, my illness makes a siren’s wail out of my blood.
my blood curdling and surging with vials of chemical it sees as foreign.
i’m foreign in a country that looks just like the one i came from. its border a two-way mirror.
in the mirror last night i shuddered at my swell. my pre-rot fighting with gabapentin.
gabapentin, indomethacin, dexamethasone, galcanezumab, i line them up like soldiers.
no. no soldiers. war is war and my body is not a site of it. no battle, just a ground.
ground mail delivers me a governmental notice. you are under medical surveillance.
the veil lifted. the state dreams about me and how many pills i swallow, too.
two pills to beg sleep to swallow me like a pill. pill bugs, maybe. caterpillars.
spilled lips. pillars of capillaries. pilled fabric of my pillow. my pillow. i dream. i dream.
i dream less often now. through the night, my illness makes a siren’s wail out of my blood.
my blood curdling and surging with vials of chemical it sees as foreign.
i’m foreign in a country that looks just like the one i came from. its border a two-way mirror.
in the mirror last night i shuddered at my swell. my pre-rot fighting with gabapentin.
gabapentin, indomethacin, dexamethasone, galcanezumab, i line them up like soldiers.
no. no soldiers. war is war and my body is not a site of it. no battle, just a ground.
ground mail delivers me a governmental notice. you are under medical surveillance.
the veil lifted. the state dreams about me and how many pills i swallow, too.
two pills to beg sleep to swallow me like a pill. pill bugs, maybe. caterpillars.
spilled lips. pillars of capillaries. pilled fabric of my pillow. my pillow. i dream. i dream.
Em Dial is a queer, Black, Taiwanese, Japanese, and White, chronically ill poet and educator born and raised in the Bay Area of California, currently living in Toronto. They are a Kundiman Fellow and recipient of the 2020 PEN Canada New Voices Award and the 2019 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award.