That Episode of 90210 When Brenda Finds a Lump
She, Kelly, & Donna do self-exams of their breasts, follow step-by-step instructions in an issue of some teen magazine on breast cancer awareness. Four years before my mother’s first diagnosis, eight before her second. Four springs & one fall before I sit with her in the waiting room of the oncologist’s office, study an arrangement of tiger lilies—orange, black-specked—my arm touching hers & the thought that the whole room is dandelion spores, might float away if not for tumor-thick blood. Brenda finds a lump 40 minutes before the kids at West Beverly take the SATs, 30 before Andrea removes her glasses in Steve’s bedroom, before they make out on his bed. Twelve years before a poet friend & I sip beer & cheap wine at the Reno Room, talk mutations, our family histories, the possibility of getting tested when, over AC/DC, through the clank & bang of pool balls, my friend yells, I don’t want to know! & I agree. 22 years before I repeat those words to my doctor, before my friend’s second pregnancy, her diagnosis, chemo treatments, bilateral mastectomy. The snatching of her ovaries. 28 years before my fingers brush a sharp-edged stone beneath my skin, before I start doing this math, 29 before my body breaks up with me, sheds itself clean. 27 winters before my cousin’s Stage 3, 29 before metastasis. Brenda finds a lump 20 summers before I meet my husband, 25 before my father slips from this life, 30 Februarys before the James Webb Space Telescope gets its first glimpse of galaxies more than 13.5 billion light-years from Earth, before it calibrates & calibrates out there in space to bring before into focus. Brenda finds a lump & is fine in the end. It’s never spoken of again.
Metastasis
Someone I love is dying & that is why I’m at Home
Depot, in the grout aisle, unable to choose between
charcoal & platinum, trying to decide if marked space
between tiles is what I want. Our lives are a series
of black gaps. Someone I love is dying & this is what
I say to myself, not knowing what it means. Today,
a Ukrainian woman told Russian soldiers to fill
their pockets with seeds, so sunflowers would grow
from their dead bodies & this is hope somehow like
paper cranes that dangle from the ceiling of the Todd
Cancer Pavilion, where bald & breastless women wait
to be called. And I want to know, when did cranes
stop being birds? When is a thing no longer itself?
3000 miles from here, in the Living Museum
at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, patients
paint their demons, twist torment into wire
sculpture in the old kitchen hall-now-art-studio—
across the street from Hillside Diner, a stainless-steel
lunch car I spent Saturday mornings as a child. Silver
dollar pancakes, blueberry compote, my father’s
BLTs. Someone I love is dying & the sharp chalk
of dinner mints spooned from the register’s shiny tin
bowl swirls on my tongue, where I turn the word
metastasis, fold & crease it into a poem & I wonder if this
is what the Greeks meant by transformation. I tell myself
it doesn’t matter how things become other, that the dark
space between is nothing more than some before nowlost
to us, that there is only what is: Hillside Diner is a Denny’s.
Paper cranes are not birds. There are flowers in bone
just waiting to bloom.
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Ja’net Danielo is the author of This Body I Have Tried to Write, winner of the MAYDAY 2022 Poetry Micro Chapbook Editors’ Choice Award, and The Song of Our Disappearing (Paper Nautilus, 2021). A recipient of a Professional Artist Fellowship from the Arts Council for Long Beach and the Telluride Institute’s Fischer Prize, her poems have appeared in Frontier Poetry, Mid-American Review, GASHER, Radar Poetry, and elsewhere. Originally from Queens, NY, Ja’net teaches at Cerritos College and lives in Long Beach, CA, where she facilitates Word Women, a free virtual poetry workshop and retreat series for women and gender nonbinary writers. You can find her at www.jdanielo.com.
“That Episode of 90210 When Brenda Finds a Lump” and “Metastasis” originally appeared in Danielo’s chapbook This Body I Have Tried to Write, published by MAYDAY.