Ode to Diabetes

Ode to Diabetes

God answered my prayers. Pray for sickness, not illness. Pray to be rouge cheeked, prayer for sweat. Let my pancreas die. The all + flesh, pinprick of a glucometer on my finger, trigger rosary bead, smudged insulin in my stomach fat, medicinal clouds. A sky darkened by endocrine storms, metabolic shock, the awe. The sweet smell of piss a perfume called abundance worn in church when I was eleven years old in white dresses. Pneumonia when I was twelve, my father in the oxygen tank, breathing him, incense & rawhide. When I got better I ate attention, the praise for being alive. There is no praise now. A needle, a sharp’s box, yellow asking me to slow down. I eat an apple & it spikes my glucose. Dawn phenomena, the sun phenomena, a phenomena of language and its failures in the light of day. gibiskwad, mixed gland in the anishinaabemowin medical dictionary. There is an error in the way I speak. The way I eat. My mouth is inhuman. It curls when I’m punished. Prayer for when I’m better, when I better take care of myself. Prayer for hiding insulin from my father. Prayer for the ritual at bedtime, the grip on the needle, the punc- ture, the pump. There is no pill to dry swallow now. Medicine is subcutaneous. It is molten & it changes form. Insulin collects in pools like holy water I’d sneak sips of in church. All those babies baptised in water I put my lips on. Let God

run through me like sugar. Like He is so sweet I’ll gag.

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Editor’s note: Brandi Bird’s “Ode to Diabetes” refuses to compress complex social and political phenomena into a single emotional arc. That a poem thrumming with pain as much as reverence is called an “ode” reveals how we actually live in and understand a world that is the source of both our suffering and our hope.

Bird’s poem teaches me that to compose an ode is itself an elegiac act. Few songs about the body are sung without reference to how much we have endured. Bird’s subject matter is diabetes and they show how it functions as a vector of colonial power (Indigenous peoples being disproportionately affected by the disease). Bird’s poem puts in mind the ways colonialism pressurizes the experience of embodiment for Indigenous peoples in ways that escape sociological attention. Even at the cellular level history rears its head.

But the poem says something else too, something crucial about living, which is that we save ourselves all the time. What we can do in the crosshairs of history’s aftermath is surrender to the minor miracles that keep us alive every day. Maybe that is how we survive. Maybe a poem is a record of that beautiful rebellion.

— Billy-Ray Belcourt, poetry editor

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