Today's poem is by Heidi Seaborn

Balancing Act
       

When my brother says we are wired the same, I envision a tightrope or slackline—our toes dipping into the space of us, balancing our sisters between.
Next week I have a follow up mammogram to probe the deep tissue of my left breast.
One sister lost her left breast to cancer, then her right, and now a saline sac has burst, leaving her lopsided.

                        ~

A new study urges annual mammograms for women starting at forty.
At forty, I lived far away from my sisters and brother. I wondered if they ever thought of me, forested in the Northwest as they were.
As, now, we all are—like Douglas firs bounded by a slackline and undergirded by roots.
Yet sometimes we talk past the past. I tell my brother we're both tornadoes. But perhaps it's just me. All that time in the sand—I mean, the sun.
When distance is measured in millimeters, then it's a tumor. Or a shot glass.When we're together, we drink to love.

So many cellars beneath that statement—bottles rotating, sediment settling.

                        ~

I pour everyone's wine to the lip of their glass. Drink, I say.
Our other sister is often sad. When we part, our hug leaves an imprint of her body on my coat. I worry.

                        ~

At the breast imaging center, I move my clothing from locker 8 to 7, as I've always turned to the number seven for luck. It's brought me small winnings and, I like to think, helped me avert disasters. After waiting two hours, I'm told I have benign calcifications.
There are calcifying lumps on my legs and left wrist. They roll like pebbles when I press on my skin. Barnacles, my mother calls hers. She and her friends label their health discussions organ recitals.

                        ~

My sister texts that she is fat and ugly. She is neither. But her distress flags are flying. I tend to swat at them and then worry myself awake.
Which is why I drift asleep in the afternoon to the buzz of lawn mowers in the park across the street.
When I wake, someone has strapped a slackline between trees. I watch as two women wobble along, hands grasping the air between them while I try to hold on to the remnants of a dream—

                        ~

something about water. My siblings. I reel it back from the dark, the dream slipping into a memory of us. Huddled in the hold during a storm. Our father overboard. Our mother helming his rescue.

                        ~

Mom calls to say my sister is headed into surgery. I think how danger incubates in the body.
How cancer festered in our father, undetected, a hitchhiker riding his blood and bone. There's only one ending to this story, but I'll try to distract us from it for as long as I can.

                        ~

Both of my sisters are gardeners. Whatever they plant flourishes. O tomatoes. O raspberries. O towering sunflowers.
My brother and I are weed pullers, I think, as I wade into my garden yanking bedstraw, buttercups, and morning glory, which I once thought to cultivate, its blue flower like a jay's wing.
There's something satisfying in weeding—the clearing away—yet it's a bottomless pour. Always another dandelion to wrest. As kids, my brother and I weeded for money. My sisters cleaned houses. I also cleaned bedpans.
Soil cuffs the garden gloves, creases my knees. My bra sticks. I stink.
So much scar tissue. Made my surgeon sweat, my sister texts on her way home from the hospital. Is this the sixth or seventh surgery on that breast?

                        ~

On our beach hike, my brother pauses to point out the mountains he once climbed. Snow grasps scarred peaks.
I envision his friends' rope, slack in the air like a dropped phone dragging along the kitchen tile.
Grief avalanches all who survived those yellowed newspaper photos from 1982.

                        ~

The empty rope is a cancer.

                        ~

My sister still sad for the crevasse of country between her and our dying father. His goodbye clicking through time zones
before leaving the wooded island of our childhood.

                        ~

Now dandelions and buttercups spread on the roadside where once there was grass, sloping into a dark stand of Douglas firs. And beyond, I hear the pop of tennis balls, a cacophony of kids at the swimming pool. Still.
I see my bike wheel spinning in the grass as it shrank in the side mirror of my kidnapper's white Dodge. My rapist.
My siblings never knew.
Until a fortieth birthday with my mother and sisters. A bit drunk on old stories when this one unbuttoned itself.
What do you wear over scar tissue? We never bothered to tell my brother.

He uncovered it in one of my poems, decades later. The omission a crevasse.

                        ~

When I read that a younger poet has died of cancer, I climb into the tent of her poems.
What solace will I leave in my enjambed lines—or do they trespass on the page, risking the tumor of an avalanche?
A text from my mother disturbs my reading. Your sister is hurting.
I can only wonder which one.

Copyright © 2024 Heidi Seaborn All rights reserved
from AGNI
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission