NONFICTION
107
THE LEFT BREAST Demitria Sabanty
I paint a portrait of my naked body, catching the reds, yellows, the surprise of purples, the saturated blues—all the unforeseen hues of my skin. In my reference photo I’m standing in a shower looking regal. My body is turned about 30 degrees to my right, draping my left side in shadow, but my face is pointed straight toward the camera, chin up, loud—no smile, no frown. My knee is jutting out with nerve. My hands are delicately curled into fists. My right breast is obscured, but my left is arresting, bulging, a glowing lighthouse, the heart of the photo. I don’t look angry. I look undeniable. My brush is bathed in pigment, tacky acrylic calcifying in the brush hairs: stiff, stiff, stiff. I ponder, H ow to capture the attitude of the neck? The grit of the lips? The density of the ass? The caress of the hair? The hate of the retina? I begin with the left breast, the apex of the photograph. The guts of me, the red core, found not in the stomach—the sad sack hanging out—but in my left breast. It holds, in its majesty, my very essence. This breast, imperfect, pointing out like a cone, has never drawn my attention before. It’s merely been a swelling, sore reminder that I’m about to bleed. I study the form of my breast, a fatty pomegranate with a bull’s-eye in its center. In the photo, the breast is ignited, divine. I stare at it for so long, with such reverence, that I almost forget it has ever been touched. But it has been touched. I fail to escape the hands, eyes, mouths, both wanted and unwanted, both foreign and beloved, which have reached for my breast. In a crowd pulsing toward the stage with the force of a great sweaty magnet. In a cold and sterile apartment, so undecorated and blank, like the man who occupies it. In a kitchen crowded like an ant farm. The intruders are endless, daring to linger everywhere, on my mighty left breast, a flag to which they pledge their
