Robert Wilson Mastectomy

Robert Wilson

Mastectomy

Alive in this nursery of cruelty, clots forming like sticky blossoms blooming into a poultice of petals along a scar traversing your heart, you cannot lift your arm, you cannot keep your head above the currents of morphine eddying along the shores of your breath.

The left side of your chest is a child’s chest, a paper doll cut-out with left-handed scissors in not enough light, and when you wake you will mistake what is numb for what is absent, you will ask, “Do you still love me?” knowing you will never be certain, symmetrical, or whole again.

You will ingest their poison, submit to the terrible glare of men, adopt what human form remains to limp across this thinnest

layer of earth, the moon in one hand, Ryonen’s mirror in the other, reflecting the pines, the tops of cedars, the voices that still call you beautiful.