Cleavage

By Wendy Mannis Scher

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            “all night it is the one breast/comforting the other” –Lucille Clifton, 
            "lumpectomy eve”
 

What you forget is how to disappear—how to unzip, step away from mammograms, ultrasounds, biopsies, diagnoses, MRIs, blood draws, bi-lateral mastectomies. What you don’t remember is the night before, curled up, facing the wall in daughter’s queen-sized bed, husband asleep on the pull-out couch, your breasts’ last hours attached to their chest. You don’t remember tears, a headache, anger at breasts angry at you, frustration with positive family-telling. What you forget is sleep, light tracings on walls/ceiling, full moon in between slats of Venetian blinds, daughter’s steady breath/snort as she shimmers deep in her own somewhere, what else? Two breasts

toss/turn their weights onto a mattress. You don’t remember mourning, cataloguing each milestone of their making, pre-pubescent fruits, painful duct swell, tickled tongue thrill, latched baby-tug, more, more. . . maybe heft and service was too much, hidden shadow flesh turning at last on itself, suicide. What do you forget dreaming of?

You forget breasts, sliced, studied, incinerated ash, smoke, cloud dust floating up there, rain. Rain cleaves to you, to earth, a foreshadowing of sorts, this becoming.

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Wendy Mannis Scher is a graduate of Smith College, the University of Colorado’s School of Pharmacy, and the University of Alaska’s MFA Creative Writing program. Her poems most recently have been published in Thin Places & Sacred Spaces (Amethyst Press), Panorama Journal, Harpy Hybrid Review, Warm Milk Publishing, and the chapbook, Fault (Finishing Line Press). Currently, Wendy lives with her family in the Colorado foothills.

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