Saturday, February 23, 2013

to keep


here is the man i married
his great gentle hands
each the size of a dinner plate.
since I met him
I have long suspected
that I might unravel in those hands
like a soft skein
of gray wool
and simply be no more
- to never again fear to sleep
and never again unwind in worry
Here is the man I married.
I picture him gently
saving my loose threads in a cardboard box
carried to the closet
placed among his other things
labeled “to keep.”

Friday, February 1, 2013

mammogram


I had a mammogram today
the technician and I bent together
over her computer screen
peering at the picture
inside me
I smiled (why not?  – even the fatal
can be beautiful)
at great swaths of grey
how I’ve swollen over the years!
fissured with lines of coarser
tissue
stark and white
we might have been seventh graders sitting
at the science table staring
at pictures of the universe
my breasts
re-imagined by the Hubble telescope
I suppose
there’s an old belief here
on the Northern Plains
older than the farmers,
the railroaders, the doctors
and the reluctant junior high science students
that we come from
the stars
and we return to them
in this room I find them
alive in my chest
their strands and constellations
strung like a milky way
my own galaxy of tissue
and flesh