LM Rochefort

HeLa’s Cells*

after I died, leavin’ five babies

Doctor took some of my cancer skin, sliced it thin

as spirit, got cultured, they say                        such little bits of me

living immortal in saintly sterile white labs

big as cathedrals

holy heaven’s a freezer. must be so, though I been hot as hell

as well, what with curing polio, HIV, HPV and all those other diseases

traveling to space even (me! who’d only been to Baltimore)

testing time, always testing: tubes, pipettes, agar plates

but oh, the pain, their litanies

eternities

hurt more than radiation, the poisons and top secret, privately-funded

experimental cloning                     yet I’ve been slowly makin’ connections:

everytime you gets—no, get—a vaccine, I spread out

everywhere, in air, in Russia         etcetera

and I’m learning from you. What else to do? I listen

close, to everyone, & thank god for osmosis.

but I’m no Goddess, as some say

for if I was, I’d shout out now:

only one thing She be missin’ these

sixty years on… I’d tell ’em if I could:

other than the weight

of sleepin’ babes in arms:

Henrietta Lacks oblivion

* Henrietta Lacks was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who, in 1951, sought treatment for cervical cancer at the Johns Hopkins medical centre in the U.S.A. Without her knowledge or permission, doctors took samples of her malignant tumour cells, successfully grew them in cultures and distributed them worldwide for research purposes. It’s estimated that the number of “HeLa” cells bought and sold for billions of dollars over more than 60 years, could circle the earth three times. When Henrietta died at the age of 31, she left five children, many of whom cannot afford health benefits. This ekphrastic poem, the first in a series based on Henrietta’s story, was inspired by Rebecca Skloot’s book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, Random House, 2010. 

  

Sex @ 31: A Journal Entry

positions the diddle versus the didactic

so she studies this German philosophy

student’s deft definition of triceps     watches

his fingers and thumb fan       a dry

susurrus of pages         the long wait

for his waist    a test    he is

            a          traveler

who stays within the margins

of pure action; refines a form of self-

embodied knowledge from a boiling

alchemy of experience            still—a little

to the left—without straying

or spills            just moans of

            ooh      please

well, every Zeitgeist has its day

in bed – peaks, plateaus, peaks

again:   one shelf, stripped of books

holds only the sigh of             words

whispered in an ear                 the tilt

of hip   against wall     press

            your     body

against mine                and all their theories

resolve themselves                  in pleasure

the sweat-soaked sheets hide

one forgotten shirt (beige)      imbued

with flat perfume of sun and dusty roads

a whole sweet world in a bed,  a

            verb     conjugated

by the cock of a pen, crusty traces

left on creamy white page: a distillation

an unmistakable one-off         ex-

periment          indelible ink-scent

of him etched on her mind      redolent

with a presence passed and the

            past      present.

Almost Alone On the Great Wall of China

Oh come on, he said, no one`s alone in China....

If you really want to be, she said, if it’s January, if it’s

minus thirty in Beijing with the wind-chill factor, if your

Canadian winters in training have taught you to dress properly

(the trick’s in the layers) and if you’re tired of the crowds, but mostly

sick and tired of your by-rote guide, the one who’s astonished to meet a

woman travelling alone, the one with crusty balls of sleep in the corners of

his eyes ‘till four in the afternoon (but I read in Lonely Planet that it’s considered

rude to remove them in public) the one who yells at his driver and thinks you can’t recognize

the sound of shit in any language, the one who tries to hide his disappointment when you ask and finally, he tells you, he has a two year old daughter; the one who huffs ‘impossible’ at the notion of China’s first woman Chairperson; the one, to give him his due, who can rhyme off every dynasty in the last four thousand years, the one who tries to dissuade you from a visit

to Tiananmen Square since ‘there’s nothing to see’... Well, I wasn’t completely

alone, she added: on the way up the three thousand mile wall (not true: you

can’t see it from space) I crossed an Icelandic couple. We didn’t chat long:

the wind was sharp and cold as a knife, the banners flapping loud as

a thousand horses’ hooves, so furiously we thought they’d be

ripped from their masts, streaks of red flowing against a

scream of blue sky; rivers of blood, upside down… 

barely their

daughter          dot.thin 

bones               pin                   brittle

un-slim self      a false mirror crack-

ed psyche lets in          little break(s)ing

light     eee       ee-E-K-G gent-

eel (elle) eeked out      eat-less                       

elect     (lech) ribs yell skel-a-ton

electro             shock   trompe-

l’oeil    miss                 fire

elect-trope       lie, die-it, B-M-I-

it indexed        flexercise         ex-                  

cised miss es    electrolyte nerve

pulses  i/imp/possible              os-

seous   skin bully         bulging buli-

mia      dil/emma         ann or an/or/ex/ia

           

70%

“So far, I’ve achieved just over 70% of what I set out to do… Not bad for an 80 year-old’s life

I suppose.” –Anonymous former architect and poet.

It’s like design—there’s one line

on the page      and then

the other—you commit

you push the pen north

            not south

it stains the arctic

white of page  you leave behind

            what you’ve put in

falls from childhood

           

a drop of blood

like payment    drips

down

            the doctor’s black bag

the trashy tinkle of instruments

sterilized in a pan, on the oven

tray      everything clangs

in the kitchen at night.

cat gut sown in tongue:

           

your mewling,

the mesh of things

becomes your scaffolding.

What surprise to have known

then you would not later be

who you are now…

the self holds on tighter

if it knows its own architecture

still, some patterns set.

we fill them in. raised

as one of four, adopt four:

for this

there is no metaphor. the years

the praise         the struggles

the good                      the bad

—the averaging—

a good night’s sleep

your love beside you.

  LM Rochefort, a member of Ruby Tuesdays writing group,

 is a freelance writer, editor and porfolio/careerist who spends much

of her spare time as Arc Poetry Magazine's Associate Poetry Editor. 

Her poetry has been long-listed for the 2011 Montreal International 

Poetry Prize and won the Diana Brebner Poetry Prize, the CAA 

National Capital Region's and Carleton University's International
Poetry Prizes. She sits on the fence (just for the view) and as a
bilingual Franco-Ontarian, enjoys outings on both sides of the Ontario/
Quebec divide. She is working on her first trade book of poetry
tentatively titled Water, Steam and Ice.