Kally

It is she whose palms welcomed me into this world,
catching my bloody body, not dropping me.
Thirty five years later, she phones to say my husband’s test results
won’t be in ‘til morning, but be ready to come to the hospital.
It’s her weekend off, but she’ll watch for them, and will call.
Before hanging up, a pause. I should know that one cause
of this condition could be a blood disorder. Another pause.
She clarifies in layperson’s terms: blood cancer.

Cancer. The first time anyone has spoken the word I have known
in my bones for weeks. The word heavy in the humid air at my sister-in-law’s.
The word that boarded the bus to the capital. The word that slept with us
in the hotel, stowed away in our check-on luggage, snuck through U.S. customs.
She gently tells me not to worry, they’ll figure it out.
Knowing I won’t sleep anyway. Her steady voice was the first
I heard on this earth, and now it catches again me as I fall
into a new life, shocking as the last time.

My love returns from his CAT scan as I hang up.
I can’t tell him. And not just because our child is standing between us.
He doesn’t like to fret over things that may or may not be, and how
could I bear to open my mouth and shove those words out?
Instead, I will hold them for him. I will keep them in my sinking stomach,
shed them in silent tears after everyone else is asleep. I will pack them
in the bag we take to the hospital, pace with them in the waiting room
during the first surgery. Soon enough, a doctor will hand him his burden.

Soon enough, we will all learn an involuntary vocabulary,
and stumble under its weight. But this night and the next,
I will carry it, almost alone but not quite, soothed by the voice
that was my introduction to sound unmuffled by liquid,
traveling through cold air. She will appear, street-clothed,
in the pre-op hallway, and once again I will be cradled
by the hands that felt my lungs expand with their first breath.
This echo of original comfort is all I have, and will have to be enough.

Prepare the Poison

Every Sunday night, I prepare the poison.
I line up translucent orange bottles
on the table where we eat family meals.
I flip open the row of little compartments,
start dropping in a week’s worth of colors.
Round white pills. Oblong white pills. Red pills.
Tan and green pills. Yellow Texas-sized pills.
Neon pink and purple pills straight out of the 80’s.
And then the blue beauties. The killers.
The ones that dissolve into his blood,
assassinating cells around them, both good and bad.

Hours later, he opens MONDAY AM and takes what I have laid out.
All 25 of them. I am relieved it happens before I wake,
so I don’t have to watch him choke them down.
He’s never been good at swallowing medication.
Later, I take him to the clinic, watch them drive the needle
into his stomach, push the plunger slowly to barrel’s end.
He thrashes, startling the nurse. He’s never been good
at getting injections. He endures it all, and then we wait.
We wait for toxins to infiltrate the rebellion.
We hope for them to slit the throats of the renegade cells
that have set up camp and are taking over his body.

The most unnerving thing about blood cancer:
it’s everywhere. You can’t cut it out.
It’s in his pinkie toe. It’s in his elbow.
His heart pumps it through four chambers and out
to waiting flesh with every pulse. When I kiss him, I think:
This is the taste of cancer. It emanates from his pores:
This is the smell of cancer. I caress his scaly, discolored skin:
This is the feel of cancer. My worst fears gather in the quiet dark:
This is the sleeplessness of cancer. I can beg the universe
until dawn, but only one thing can I do of any use:
every Sunday night, I prepare the poison.

Apheresis

The apparatus whirs and hums and occasionally clicks
next to M’s hospital bed. On the other side of the curtain,
more machines join the quiet chorus. Nurses tread softly
in rubber-soled shoes; many of the patients are sleeping.
It’s like flying first class, with cheerful uniformed attendants
offering a juice or crackers, a blanket or pillow,
a pair of headphones to watch a movie on demand.
Except on an airplane they don’t stick you with a needle
the size of a garden hose, send your blood flowing
through tubes to a centrifuge separating the parts
into clear plastic bags hanging on a rack.
Who knew such different colors combine
to form the fluid that flows out of a cut?
The yellow plasma, scarlet erythrocytes and platelets,
and finally the deep crimson of stem cells, which might
as well be gold for what they are worth to us.
They will be the only path leading M to survival
after chemo wipes out his bone marrow, leaving a barren field.
These seeds will be sown, and we will watch them,
holding our breath, to see if they sprout into a harvest
of unmutated, nonmalignant normality.
The nurse knows what this bag of liquid means to us,
seals it carefully before carrying it reverently to the scale,
where she weighs it, and then a colleague
does the same, to make sure there are no errors.
To ensure the precision of M’s salvation.
When she leaves to deliver it to cryopreservation storage,
I want to stop her. Surely she can’t just walk off like that?
There should be a benediction, a ceremony, an invocation
before she heads down the linoleum hallway
with M’s life in her hands.

Aria Dominguez (she/they) is a writer whose poetry and creative nonfiction navigate the terrain between beauty and pain. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, and she was winner of the 2021 Porch Prize in Creative Nonfiction, finalist for the 2021 Lighthouse Writers Workshop Emerging Writers Fellowship in Nonfiction, winner of a Fall 2021 Brooklyn Poets Fellowship, and winner of the 2022 Sunlight Press Essay Contest. She works with a nonprofit focused on food justice and lives in Minneapolis with her son.