“all night it is the one breast/comforting the other” –Lucille Clifton,
"lumpectomy eve”
What you forget is how to disappear—how to unzip, step away from mammograms, ultrasounds, biopsies, diagnoses, MRIs, blood draws, bi-lateral mastectomies. What you don’t remember is the night before, curled up, facing the wall in daughter’s queen-sized bed, husband asleep on the pull-out couch, your breasts’ last hours attached to their chest. You don’t remember tears, a headache, anger at breasts angry at you, frustration with positive family-telling. What you forget is sleep, light tracings on walls/ceiling, full moon in between slats of Venetian blinds, daughter’s steady breath/snort as she shimmers deep in her own somewhere, what else? Two breasts
toss/turn their weights onto a mattress. You don’t remember mourning, cataloguing each milestone of their making, pre-pubescent fruits, painful duct swell, tickled tongue thrill, latched baby-tug, more, more. . . maybe heft and service was too much, hidden shadow flesh turning at last on itself, suicide. What do you forget dreaming of?
You forget breasts, sliced, studied, incinerated ash, smoke, cloud dust floating up there, rain. Rain cleaves to you, to earth, a foreshadowing of sorts, this becoming.
