One Poem by j.lewis

 

every cancer is my mother

 

of course i was intimate with her breasts

puny thing nursing on her nineteen year old nipples

the price she paid for marrying young to escape

alcoholic parents. her biggest sorrow that

she couldn't rescue her younger sister too

 

but that's another story. this one is about

what happens over and over and over

to women young and old who never asked

for the pink ribbons in october, who never

begged to lift a cup to curie or to

the menacing mammogram machine

 

who dreaded the news of a sister or cousin

or worse yet, their own mother's pre-death

certificate, that single razor-edged word

that doesn't need to be said here because

you know what it is, know what comes next

know that five-year survival rates are lies

 

know that choosing to treat means pain,

disfigurement, loss of lover's touch,

dreams destroyed or at best put on hold

and ultimately means only delaying

the inevitable end. you cry but

it doesn't change anything

 

you know that not treating leads to

the same unavoidable finality, the only

difference being how long you have

to say "i love you and goodbye"

 

as a traveling nurse i expected to get

every worst assignment, every difficult

or demanding patient that the regular staff

needed a break from and i never said no

until the night i went to work, just months

after my mother bled out—her way of saying

"no more"—and found i'd been assigned

a woman my mother's age whose breasts

had betrayed her and were

unceremoniously

bilaterally

removed

 

that was thirty-some years ago

and all that has changed is that

the faces get younger and younger

i've lived past the age when my own

mother stopped aging, and with every

revelation from a female friend

or stranger, my mind flashes back

to the wigged woman in her recliner

jaw set tight against the pain

holding on for reasons only she knew

holding on for two miserable years

 

it's that image, burned into my grief

that makes every cancer personal

and every woman my mother

 

j.lewis is an internationally published poet, musician, nurse practitioner, and the editor of Verse-Virtual, an online journal and community. When he is not otherwise occupied, he is often on a kayak, exploring and photographing the waterways near his home in California. He is the author of four full length collections, with a fifth forthcoming in 2023, plus eight chapbooks. Learn  more  at https://www.jlewisweb.com/books.asp