Redefining Her

The anatomy of her young life was

primary red. One cloud-high day, she cleared

for takeoff on a runway. Next, her hard,

sudden fall. Illness, a large exhausted lack.

“There is nothing wrong with you,” said doctors,

in decades multiplied like judgments. She was

told the symptoms were imaginary.

To dismiss her was efficient, like acid.

She lives, then, in a chain; in sclerosis

of her will; altered by this school of loss.

But medical tests had been measuring the

wrong things. Research now maps abnormalities

in the blood, brain, and cells. A wonder, then—

she and her silver fraction of life remain.