Polypsest

Assistant Editor Blessing Christopher: This week’s miCRo offers a convergence of form and content. Anastasia Nikolis’s figure poem, sculpted into the shape of a pipe, slowly but relentlessly courses through the innards of a public health crisis, stopping only when we reach the core.

Listen to Nikolis read the poem:

Note: The full transcript of the poem can be found after the image.

Transcript

Polypsest

After yet another study reports on the crisis of colon cancer in my generation, and yet another family member reports an intestinal polyp, I’m more than aware that I need to get myself checked, and I will. But first I’ll spend some months in the blue glow of research at 3 a.m. trying to understand why this is happening and what I can do (besides what I’m supposed to do) to fix it. Or prevent it. Or whichever verb conveys that I’m terrified of the symptoms I’m supposed to be alert to and convinced I have all of them by 4 in the morning, and by 6 I’ve panicked myself to sleep again, so by 8 I’m awake adding extra fiber—Grape-Nuts! Chia seeds!—to my morning yogurt. We call this pipe cleaning in my household, any time we ingest whole-grain-this or dark-leafy-green-that, to inject some levity into this public health crisis because I wonder if maybe it wasn’t the purple ketchup and rubbery macaroni and cheese we ate in the ’90s or a lack of fiber in the American diet that caused all this intestinal buildup but instead a lack of joy. That if I swapped my diet of “Unprecedented Times” and “No Way To Prevent This” for more coloring books and craft supplies, I’d glide those chenille pipe cleaners beneath polyps and cilia to find a palimpsest of bygone-biology, a layer of forgotten myocardium quietly beating, waiting to remind us we were once made of heart.