The Contact Before Surgery
was the hands of a boyish resident.
He came in when I was alone.
Out there, a corridor of Hands.
Hands rushing in white coats.
Hands and the bag of blood,
the cord of sugared water,
the gash to come and my hours
of silence. His hands
circled, hands on my breasts
beneath the thin white gown
that opened in the back.
No one had touched them.
He pulled up a chair.
I know your high school.
I went to the catholic school
up the road, The Christian Brothers.
He touched the part
of my body not sick.
But I had discarded
the whole of it by then.
I didn’t speak.
His hands were between us.
The everyday doctors did not
look at me or sit beside me.
It was an old lesson: hands
and the price of attention.
* * * * *
That shirt makes you a whore because it’s black
I paid for the whore shirt with my own money,
bought it at the mall. It was button-down
and satin to the touch. Who was this whore
that had never kissed anyone, not even her
mother. Who would not menstruate until
she was old enough to leave home, until
she had tasted fat, the pleasure of its depth.
Whoreness must have started at the sleepovers
when we played hooker. We stripped for each other.
No, whoreness started younger: at three, at two, at birth—
in the womb, whoring with balled fists and floating
in the whore sea. When the 11 year olds played
streetwalker I was the best. What did the best mean?
It meant no smile. It was shame in girl form, which
was shame’s first form. It meant relinquish the body.
It meant do not eat in front of others, do not pee in public
bathrooms, not even school. It was the body in plain sight
but hidden — the girl’s small cocked hip in the room of girls.
* * * * *
Dotted Line
I come from the dotted line on the family tree.
The dotted line my brother drove through
to the states we’d never been. No one noticed
he’d run away until he called and asked
Guess where I am?
Where?
Ar Kansas.
Do you mean Arkansas?
He was not a person I loved anymore
though I loved him more than anyone
I had ever loved. We never spoke on the phone.
Never him. Never my mom. Never my grandmother
who drew a dotted line
to the three of us after the divorce.
Once my mom called me in college.
I thought someone had died.
I had a dream about you, she said.
It was the year of blackouts. No one knew.
I forgot everything. It was like falling
into the sky. It was like disappearing
inside a closet, like hiding in a gap of the earth.
A great omission. A face that only a mother could love.
What is the face without the only. Without the mother.
Why am I not tied to them. Why is there no thread.
Why when I slept did my brother rise and walk
to a clearing in the trees. There he made a seat
from a log, formed a table from a stump.
I was not asleep, but I didn’t know where I had been.
The time was missing. It scattered like the hundred
pin pricks on our childhood wall. We poked them
between the cracks, a map of lands. Who can say grace?
the neighbor asked before she fed us. My brother
and I repeated Grace, Grace, Grace. She shook
her head at us. We were the only grandchildren
who didn’t go to church, who didn’t learn
that communion was Jesus in your mouth.