DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE Poem: The Fifth Resurrection, by Lindsay Liang

I wake in a body that is both mine and not mine.
The first thing I taste is iron.
The oxygen burns through my throat like rust,
scouring me from the inside out.
The machines whisper their mechanical language,
a steady beep-beep-beep drilling through my skull,
a countdown to something I can’t see.

I should be gone already.
I know this.
They told my mother I was a mistake,
a smear on an ultrasound,
a wrong answer waiting to be erased.
The doctor squinted at the screen,
said something that made them hesitate.
I should have been a decision they never regretted.
Instead, I became a question they never stopped asking.

I should have left with the others—
with the pale hand curled stiff beside mine,
with the body zipped inside the thick yellow plastic,
with the wheels rolling slow, slow,
the fluorescent light smearing over sealed flesh.
I watched it move past me,
a body still holding its last breath,
trapped beneath something that does not breathe.

How long does it take to become cold?
How long before skin forgets that it was once warm?
How long before the body no longer belongs to itself?

I have died before.

In the silence where my mother tongue was buried,
choked beneath the weight of foreign words,
drowned beneath the tide of languages I was told to keep instead.
My first tongue had no letters,
so they made sure it had no future.
But I still remember how it sounded before it disappeared.

I have died before.

Beneath the hands of someone who did not see me,
only the body,
only the shape,
only the way it could be arranged,
bent,
reshaped into something that belonged to them.
I walked out, but I left something behind,
something I can never retrieve.

I have died before.

They scanned my brain and told me something was missing.
A hole where an artery should be,
a riverbed that was never carved,
a structure that should have collapsed at birth.
“You were never supposed to live,” the doctor said.
I think he meant it kindly.

I want to ask him—then what am I doing here?

A mistake that refused to erase itself.
A scar that kept growing back.
A body that should not exist,
but does.

I wake up again.
The bed beneath me is still cold.
The machine still beeps.
The plastic curtain still flutters at the edges.
I open my mouth to speak,
but nothing comes out—

Somewhere, the flowers begin to bloom.