Melissa Joplin Higley

FRAGMENTS FROM A WAITING ROOM

The autumn trees, outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, are dark-limbed, quiver-leafed—

Ghosts fade into sun-dappled yellow, orange, red.

Showers of terrible light.

My newly missing breast feels phantom-alive, all nerve-itch and bee-sting.

Memories drift between the trees.

Something just fell apart.

I stare and stare and nothing looks back.

I don’t sleep when I should.

Today, my fortune read: “It’s tempting to make promises, but can you fulfill them all?”

I’m afraid to write anything down.

If I could, I would stay inside my house for days.

I’m getting used to looking at my naked, new self.

A five-inch, horizontal scar lives where my left breast used to be.

The severed nerves might never find a way back to themselves.

I wonder where the cancer center stores its legions of plastic pumpkins in the off-season.

I’m a waiting room without windows.

Let me show you my scars.

White lines of loss etch themselves into permanent gesture.

Is this the best I can hope for?

When I touch my reconstructed breast, it feels like I’m touching someone else.

The ghost—heavy, flesh-made—someone else.

I can’t cry, even though I need to.

I try to get a cup of coffee, but the clinic cafe has just closed.

Things only come now in pieces.

Where is my language?

A moon without a planet.

I am afraid.

Whispering, I choose to be here.

I choose to say I choose, even when it’s not true.

I trust I’ll know what to do with my hands.

Laying down one horizontal line, then another—