55

You hold out your cell phone, showing me a picture of your motorcycle. It's blue--my favorite color. At first I don't recognize the woman sitting on the bike, grinning at the camera. You've lost about 30 pounds since then. And you've died your hair red--one last time before it starts to fall out.

I tell you that I love your nail polish--teal with that crackle layer on top that I used back in high school. You make it look classy, even in that faded blue hospital gown. You tell me how badly you want to go to the makeup class they're teaching for oncology patients on Monday. I tell you that I hope you feel better soon so that you can go. I really, really hope you can make it.

I say goodbye, and promise to come back soon.

Later, I look at your CT, a mug shot of the cancer growing in your belly. Hidden inside, it managed to move to your liver and lungs before anyone knew it was there. I feel my throat close a little, that heaviness in my chest. I know that we are reaching the end, that there is little more we can offer you. I want to see you on that motorcycle again, your red hair blowing and those teal crackled nails clutching the handlebars, somehow outrunning the cancer.

You're 55. You're so young. It's not fair.

Bricolage

The pain of being used and discarded
Every drop of nectar wrung from my body
lapped up greedily
like magnetic ambrosia
until nothing but a pile of bones remained.
My abandoned skeleton
has now the most insipid of sweetnesses left to offer

My parents' hair has lost its color, not its curl,
but who were all the crows
that perched at the corners of their eyes
and etched the wrinkles into their faces?
What were the sweets and the genes
and the memories
that make their wounds
unable to heal?

An egalitarian whim:
that I were a person
before this gendered body!
whose purity is assessed by penetration
whose virtue is found in the the one at her side
whose potential is realized when the empty space within
forms another gendered body.

Tortuous torrents of fear flow underneath
For there is no operation for cataracts
of the third eye.
What is written
I no longer know

Their shrinking spines,
the vapid sugar of my veins,
my hollow womb, clotting like a hardened heart,
all fill me with unease
my clouded intuition cannot dispel.

Punctuation

Sometimes the silence is too much to bear.

A moment stolen
from intolerable rigmarole,
embodied in my smile:
relief, anticipation, creation
the neurotransmitter floods the synapse like
the dot of the exclamation point the sparkle in my eye
(!)

I could share
this with anyone.
I could.
But breath arrests action
and the mere act of inhaling
is a reminder that life is about accepting
being alone.

Smiling alone is sometimes too strange.

So:
turn on the radio,
listen to that pop song,
envision movement,
suppress the pining for the wish that
loneliness
could be put to rest earlier than
my death.