Tell me what killed you

Was it the hand?    The needle?        Mortality’sprecision    pushing        the thumblike a hammer—    a burial.        Was it science?Instinct?    Your lungs        or the airalready pulsing    with mycobacterium        tuberculosis—another’s body    calling your body        its home.

on the phone my mother says    she doesn’t rememberit was before my time    before grandmothertore me from her skin    my dead sister—a ghost indigo bone bright    as an unbombed sky—before the bombs the burnings    years lost in betweennights         hiding     beneath the floorboardsour ears pressed to the ground    listening the childrenharvested like blanched rice    stripped strapped downon a wet bench   screaming    without sound   their skullsshrunken     measured    a white man’s pleasureincubated in a jar a photograph    clipped from Timemagazine   before time    stood on its hind legs   barkinglike a mad dog   wild with iron    in its blood   i’m sorryi don’t remember—    call it back—it was beforemy time—call all of it back    it’s mine—a ghostan unbombed sky    my dead—it’s mine.

Louis Pasteur was a French scientist. He createdthe first vaccine for tuberculosis. His discoveriesconfirmed that small organisms invade living hostsand, in turn, are responsible for bacterial infection.

The Pasteur Institute was Louis’s teaching laboratory.It exported knowledge to the colonial world to curemankind and serve the darker peoples, to free themof the illnesses conceived from their own darkness.

The first Pasteur Institute constructed outside of Francewas built in my mother’s village. It gathered over 300,000newborns across Vietnam and injected them withMycobacterium tuberculosis cultivated inside chickens

and pigs. Louis hypothesized that by injecting bacteriainto these children, into a people who more or less justchickens and pigs, wild and dark, dumb and undoneby their own darkness, their bodies might learn to save

themselves, to barricade its blood against invasion.How ironic the function of science: teaching an imbecilepeople, a farmed and butchered beast, to protect themselves—to kill a foreign species with nothing but their anti-bodies.

Why claim this?   Why want    any of it?   The hand.   The needle.        Mortality’s precisionpushing the thumb    like a hammer.   A burial.        Why want what killsme: this history,    this unnamed murderer.        Tell me what killed you.Was it science—   Instinct—    Experiment—   Your lungs or the air        already pulsing—Tell me who did it.   Give them to me.    Give me their artifacts:         The evidence—   The flesh unkissedby dawn—   The pigs, the children    never given names   just numbers—        Data—     Figures in a table—Empire’s uncalculated desire—    All of them—   The 300,000 dead—        The millions and millions more dead,the ones still waiting   underneath—    Ears     pressed to sealed earth, scorched        indigo,     bone bright—Their grief   becoming gills,    bloodshot and mutant, carving a door        back from oblivion.Give me them all.