What We Talk About When We Talk About Cancer
Fishy, my mother calls her lymph nodes. She tells me
her voice box is a box full of cancer. She says once
a doctor spilled my brother’s tumor trying to take it out.
I search “cancer images” and my screen tiles and fills
with splattered burrs leaking radiance from under
their hems. Each has landed on the surface of a moon.
I think of the man who took the wasps’ nests down
from our eaves. I think of the two-sided utensil
with which my mom scooped cantaloupe into marbles—
some taws, some peewees—to suspend in jello. I do not
know whether the surgeon will scoop or scrape
my mother’s windpipe clean. But then, nothing rests
on my knowing whether a tumor is more bowl or balloon,
more shadow or lump. For that, there is the Canadian doctor
for whom my mom, at her second appointment,
wore a sweater knit white around a Norwegian Maple leaf.
I wanted to be remembered, she explains, this woman
who can’t run an errand without someone thrilling
to see her and trying to rally their kids: It’s her, the teacher
I told you about! Of course the oncologist who will take
my mom’s voice, exiling wasps, excising orb
from flesh, knows none of this. I can’t imagine anyone
forgetting you, I say, and Don’t cry, my mother says,
in the voice a stranger couldn’t tell from mine.
