For Henrietta Lacks

 

Photograph

Only one picture accompanies
each account of your hidden story:
sometimes cropped, here blown up,
enlarged to show your face. You appear

solid, hands on your hips, skirt hanging heavy
like a kilt, hair up, pinned into an oblong bun,
standing on some platform and smiling down
broadly on the cameraman.

If not for that, the tilt in your hips,
the bend in your knee, would make it seem
you’re waiting for something – your sandaled foot,
awkward among all the wool, about to tap.

It’s now impossible to know what caused the noise
that distorts your check: light skipping
between silver-halide granules
of old film, your skin reflecting

the limits of primitive photography?
Or perhaps the loss was digital –
scanned once from some old album
ten years back, renamed, shared, corrupted,

some pixels now showing lavender
and teal, invented at the meeting grounds
of light and shadow, impossible
tones among a field of sepia.

Mitosis

Your chromatin has been
doubled up for hours, waiting uncoiled –
When I flip on the lamp of the microscope,
I see this long yarn balled into the shape
of a clothespin, two copies pinched
together in the middle. These sister
pairs wobble and twitch
like dice shaken in a cup.
As you prepare to divide
you pick your feet
from the slip and float up
balled, out of the plane
of focus, a circle
abstracted and haloed
in diffracted light.

Tumor, 1951

At twenty, you married and had the first
of your five babies, each one
an exercise in the horticulture of the womb,
its surfaces gone blood-shot and soft
or stretched wide, then deflated,
cells broken, then grown back.

You had been bleeding for months
from your cervix, a swollen plum.
Smearing radioactive salves on its skin
did nothing, and after a few months
you stopped bothering with the train to Baltimore
for biopsies and treatments. Its cells flowed
through your blood stream, sticking to your lungs,
your liver, your heart. Your moaning
kept your children up at night
until you died within the year at thirty-one.

Rose chamber

Two metal walls clamped together
by screws hold airtight a seal
of foam and glass – two portholes letting
a light beam shoot through cover slips, one
abraded, full of footholds for cells.

Fifty years ago, someone shined
a flashlight on this same culture through
the crude jaw of a speculum. Now,
a tiny bath of media, one day’s
ration, feeds them as they grow
under the lens of the microscope.

Early incubator

In George Gey’s machine,
your tissues stayed growing
in pockets of hand-blown glass imbedded
on the inside of a massing churning drum.
As each one neared the cycle’s apex
the media drained down from cells
now breathing in the air,
still grabbing their inverted bed as easily
as flies walk on a ceiling.

The day of your death
Gey’s image was broadcast
in a blanket of television waves
across the whole nation.
In his hand was a little vial
he named HeLa.
He thanked you as
Helen Larson and explained
to America how medicine
was about to change.

Your cells were the first to live longer
than a week outside the body, the first line
useful for studying anything other
than death in a Petri dish.

First human in space, 1960

Forty thousand pounds of you
now grows in sheets in dark incubators.
Unchecked, the cells divide
until they tumble over one another
and the whole group dies. Your cervix
is spread in colonies across the world.

Your cells today have 89 chromosomes
instead of 46, almost the number of
two cells fused. But really it’s just
been you, lonely, gone sloppy with your
division, giving one daughter everything
or an extra arm of number 21, leaving
the other to die with nothing.

Years ago, a vial of your cells
was rocketed into orbit in a craft
small as an oil barrel to see if something
in space could kill what Uranium
didn’t. No one should have been
surprised that you lived through it.

Dinner Party, 1976

What a shock it must
have been for your daughters
to hear a technician at the hospital,
a brother of a friend, say
your name sounds so familiar
when they had no idea
your body was still alive.

Chimeras

Your tumor was a separate community
mutated, distinct from the tissues
living in your skin or brain, but
a year before your death you didn’t know
any better than to call the whole mess your body.

Two years ago I learned that every female
was put together like you,
one X or the other packed away
at random when she’s still in the womb, her hands
with one genetic fingerprint
and her feet with another.
My whole body is splotched this way,
intestines and skin and hair
all tabbied like a cat.

Confession

I’ve spent hours at a time
staring at a sheet of your cervix, and
made three structures in your cells
grow red, green, and blue, blasted your womb
with a laser enough to bleach it out,
taken photographs. I injected you
with doses of cancer drugs, watched how
your chromosomes jitter and don’t align,
sweet-looking pairs of dots that stick together
and glow under the microscope, bobbing
in and out of focus as they float.

Last month I was passing your cells
to a new flask when on accident
I spilled a drop of media
on my hand, and I imagined
my skin soaking up
the serum, taking you
with it to the inner layers
of my body, where you’d start
a new home in tissues
you don’t care
are not your own.

Reparations, 2003

The same familiar photograph
of you has now been applied to silver
poster board, your head floating
in the middle of a five-pointed star
held righteously in the hand of one
of your grand-daughters, who demands
before a video camera that someone,
anyone, ask the family
for permission
to let you live.

 

 

Jessica Polka (UNC-CH)