It’s not MS, she said,
as we held our breath—
my knee slow to show reflex,
my shoulder collapsing when pressed.
I went in for what I thought was a trap pull,
for what I still can only describe as cadaver-like
cold patches piss-streaming my legs, for her to hold
my hand and say it’s all going to be okay. Instead, I found
her single negative halting, haunting in the glare of winter daylight—painroot wrought from spine and scapula to each of my carpal bones. It’s not MS—a definitive from which came many derivatives:
a stack of vials alive with me, poems about sunrise
not about bright beginnings.
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Excerpted from Blue Opening by Chet’la Sebree. Copyright © 2025 Chet’la Sebree. Published with permission from Tin House Books, an imprint of Zando, LLC.
Chet’la Sebree
Chet’la Sebree is the author of Blue Opening, Field Study, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress, selected by Cathy Park Hong as the winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry. Her essays and poems have been anthologized in Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain’s Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, Kwame Alexander’s This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, and others. Sebree is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University.
