Category: 100 Words

Day 56: Scar

I have a horizontal scar on my breast about an inch long, marking the spot where the surgeon reached in and pulled out a cancerous tumor last year.

I like it. It’s straight and skin colored, not angry, puckered, or jagged. It’s the perfect slot for a pocket square, or a button hole where a man might slip a flower to decorate his lapel. It could be a runway where planes take off, or the top of a bookshelf where my favorite novel lives. It could be a window waiting to be opened, or a sleeping ocean ready to wake.

Day 55: Recipe for Balancing the Fifth Chakra (Throat)

Give it your best shot, at fifty, with
Seventy-four bars of alto octave notes
Ranging from “Blest Be the Lord,” to
“Eyes Without a Face,” and “Unshaken.”
String a lapis crystal around your neck,
Hang it on a wire, hold it between your teeth.
Write a letter, which you then read aloud
For four days straight, to each direction,
Then burn.
Eat blueberries. And seaweed.
Swallow an idea, which then grows a vine of
Words which might explain, if they were only
Said, instead of hummed on the other end of the phone.
Drink. More.
Once again, rise and sing.

Day 54: Safari

My aunt’s memory is failing. We first noticed this two years ago, when she got lost on the way to the grocery store; these days, she can hardly be left alone.

My dad, her impatient and controlling younger brother, is having a hard time with it.

Most recently, they fought when she told him she just returned from Africa. He reminded her, loudly and with considerable frustration, that she’d not left their neighborhood in years.

I’m truly disappointed in him. What sense does it make to argue? She will be gone soon. I want to know what happened in Africa.

Day 53: Fortune Cookie

There’s this guy in my French class, quiet, dark hair, fucking dreamy. Smart, too. He sits in the back and answers Mme. Devlin perfectly every time. Even his accent is pretty.

He came to pick up food at the restaurant tonight. Beef with broccoli, eight egg rolls, hot and sour soup, and enough mu shu pork to feed the offensive line. Pop didn’t see me slip a dozen extra fortune cookies into the bag.

I picture him picking one from the pile. He cracks it and smiles, reading the message from me to him, all the words I’ll never say.

Day 52: Warmth

The day we broke up, I returned your jacket. I emptied the pockets and held it out. You hesitated, then took it from me carefully, so our fingers wouldn’t touch.

I thought of the times you warmed me.

You rubbed my shoulders as we stood in line outside the movie theater. You gave me your sweatshirt at that tailgate party when the wind picked up. You wrapped a blanket around us at the beach, an impromptu tent that kept our heat in when dusk cooled the sand.

We were not good for each other. But you were excellent at that.

Day 51: New

Give to me your mouth.
It fixes me as if with a hammer and nail,
Abruptly, with no denying.
Your tongue polishes my voice,
Your lips fashion a chain clasping your breath to mine.

Give to me your hips.
They push the world,
Grind and level with their insisting sway,
The invisible language of currents
Caught by my hands.

Give to me your hair.
That darkness, that commanding forest
Untethered by ribbon
Is silkened by an exhalation of water over rocks.
Breathing on its own, deciding.

Give to me your elbow, eyebrow, and ear,
Your full throat of gasping bliss.

Day 50: Clockwise

You speak of my breast as a clock,
With it’s cancerous tumor at noon.
Or is it midnight?
I’d rather talk about ten-forty-five,
The spot my cat uses, while I’m asleep,
For a stepping stone on his way to my stomach;
The U shape from three to six to nine,
Where underwires like chain mail
Left dents along my skin;
Five-fifteen, where the heel of my husband’s palm
Rests when I’m on top of him;
The center, pink-brown bullseye
With precise, invisible clock hands spinning,
Where my daughter latched, pulled, and fed milk
From the duct you’ve named noon (midnight?).

Day 49: Clock

Oncologists, surgeons, and radiologists have decided to navigate the breast as a clock. This way, they can easily communicate about the location of tumors and other irregularities.

I get it. Boobs are (sort of) round. They have a nipple in the middle, anchoring the invisible clock’s hands. Twelve and six are at the top and bottom, with three and nine at the viewer’s right and left.

But have none of these incredibly intelligent people realized that for a cancer patient, a reference to time calls to mind time passing, and potentially running out, and that’s probably not the best idea?

Day 48: Owl Moon

I can’t believe I’m not scared.

(My brother teases me about all the things I’m afraid of. He laughed when I screamed at the spider in my shoe. He tells tall tales about the creature under my bed, so I can’t sleep. He said I wasn’t brave enough to talk to Ella Whistler.)

It’s dark, and Ella and I are alone together, in the woods. But fear can’t show its face when she walks beside me.

It was her idea to call the owls. We cup our hands around our mouths, whoot-whooting goodnight. They call back, invisible under the moon.

Day 47: Ride

The snow is coming fast, piling on the windshield. I try the ignition again. Nothing. Fuck.

Three knocks make me jump.

“Need a ride?”

It’s Trevor, who got suspended our freshman year for bringing knives to school. He jerks his thumb toward his pickup.

We’ve talked, like, twice in my life. But we’re the only ones left in the lot, and home is too far to walk.

He drives with his hands on ten and two. The pickup rides easily, without sliding the way my stupid Corolla does. He turns up the heat and turns down the music.

“Warm enough?”