Poetry | May 17, 2022

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.