The Frequency the Body Keeps (Henrietta Lacks)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
The doctor
took the cells
without asking.
That is
the first sentence
and the last sentence
and every sentence
in between
is just
the distance
the cells traveled
after
the first sentence
ended
and the asking
did not
begin.

[Verse 2]
You were
thirty-one
in a segregated ward
at Johns Hopkins
in nineteen fifty-one
and the tumor
on your cervix
was the fastest
any surgeon
in the building
had ever seen
a tumor grow
and the surgeon
cut a sliver
and sent it
to the lab
and the lab
put the sliver
in a dish
and the sliver
did something
no human cell
had ever done
in a dish
before —
it lived.

[Chorus]
Your cells
divided
and divided
and did not stop
dividing
and the cells
tasted
like the cold
clean glass
of a future
that had been
waiting
for a container
it could survive in
and the container
was you
and no one
told the container
what was being
taken
from it.

The cells
went to
every lab
on the planet.
The cells
went to space.
The polio vaccine
lives
in the cells.
The cancer research
lives
in the cells.
The cells
have been
alive
for seventy-five years
and you
have been
dead
for seventy-four
of them.

[Verse 3]
Your family
found out
twenty years later
from a researcher
who called
to ask
for blood samples
and did not
realize
the family
did not know
and the phone call
had the brittle
beige weight
of a door
opened
from the wrong side.

[Outro]
The cells
are called HeLa
which is
the first two letters
of your first name
and the first two letters
of your last name
and the name
is in
every biology textbook
on the planet
and the textbooks
did not
contain
your photograph
or your story
or the word
*permission*
until
this century
and the cells
kept dividing
the whole time
the century
was deciding
whether
to say
your name
out loud.

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