Poetry | May 17, 2022
5 Poems
Lynne Ellis
You Will Be Ready / Total Hysterectomy
There will be days in this medical experience
when you feel like you’re the only citizen
of Pluto, landed right in the cardioid curve
of its dry sea, as every spacecraft from Earth
skips you and passes, off to photograph
some other beauty object. Even the Voyager
ships, with their golden records, will ignore
your out-there underworld.
The Sounds of Earth does not contain
the tin scrap music of the MRI machine,
or the ::thwick:: of the spring-retracting blood-
draw needle, and though The Sounds
of BRCA1 is imprinted with these noises,
you will also hear kinder human voices:
laughter as it fills the vinyl flooring
and technicians willing to talk about anything.
When it’s time, you will be ready
to release the loneliest parts of your body.
And afterward, you will wake up
on a new planet, on a cliff above
an unrelenting ocean, where all the creeks
fill with waterfalls and moss breaks
out in hungry piles on nurse logs.
You will run your fingers over the wet
green, the feather press-and-spring of it.
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