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