Acute Rejection
A raw poem, 2/4/26
I knew rejection intimately, long before My transplant turned the word into a slow-motion bullet My armor a composite of forty-seven pills a day Every day Pills that make fresh, lovely food taste like a dead bird from a cat’s mouth Make my hair come out in clumps, keep me appallingly awake But I have to trust them to persuade this wayward body That the new lung my team has sutured and stapled into a gash in my chest After slicing out the wounded, airless one Is now part of me Though we all know it never quite will be And I have to live with that—or at least try not to die with it Not yet
I courted rejection unwittingly with my sudden midlife yearning to be a writer A calling that renders these wounds commonplace And makes solitude unavoidable. My extrovert battery dies Every day From the lamentable lack of human contact, the scarcity of affirmation— And yet I berate myself: if I had been more than diligent Would my books be alive in the world already? Then I might be spared this breakneck feeling that I have many more stories in me than time left to write them. And also—I will never understand how writers can gleefully set “100 rejections a year” as their goal Could I just have none instead, please? But the editors decree Not yet
Nor is the writing life my first battle with rejection—nor is this my first transplant At eight years old, when I was transplanted to American soil The rejection was acute Every day For years and years—for being Other and for speaking oddly Though I could not seem to stop wounding myself by speaking to people. I loved them. I practiced spelling in my sleep so my English would not mark me out Which was exactly what marked me out I tried too hard I wanted only to overcome their objections, to achieve The undeniable belonging that has never quite come—or at least Not yet
Now they tell me my new lung is at high risk for acute rejection My body wants to destroy the interloper that gave me back my breath nine months ago It’s breaking off fragments of my donor’s DNA and rushing them through my blood Every day But it’s not time to panic, they say They can simply funnel more of that dead-bird medicine into me Let my hair come out in clumps, keep me appallingly awake Every day Until we have persuaded my wayward body once again To overcome its objections And accept what is unacceptable Every day To render me just undefended enough to live, to breathe Yet not so defenseless that I become dust Not yet Not yet Not yet
This is so beautiful and heartbreaking. Thank you for sharing ❤️ Sending prayers for healing and relief.
Beautifully captures a slice of life that cuts deep.