Foreword
Clean Margins is deeply personal. Abby Paige writes, “We come-to with a knot tied above our nipple, / a little lock installed atop our breast.” The we in “Clean Margins” is both the speaker and her sister. This we is me and my dearest friend who I sat with week after week as chemotherapy pumped into the port in her chest. Even if you’ve never listened to a doctor’s voice say the words “your cells have breached the margins,” you are this we. You are implicated. You are invited.
In 1970, a woman’s lifetime risk of developing breast cancer was 1 in 10. Now the risk is 1 in 8. This we is every one of us singing out: “Please look at me while I am here.”
Paige focuses, in this collection, on the body. She has given us all a microscope and asked that we examine tissue, legs, flesh, hand, arm, scars. We are cartographers of “the smoky / terrain.” It is the intimacy between speaker and reader that propels this collection.
What excites me about a micro chapbook is the further condensation of narrative and language, and in Clean Margins, Paige has managed a full and beautiful journey in ten tightly woven poems. This collection is both the terror of ”needles and blood / and gauze and waiting” and a gorgeous prayer where we “begin to believe / it is all possible again.”
Allison Blevins
June 2020
Clean Margins
Table of Contents
Biopsy 1
Before
The Irises
In Your Image
Clean Margins
Irradiation
Love Letter from My Body
Convalescence
Amen
Biopsy 2
When a cancerous tumour is removed, the surgeon also removes the normal tissue that surrounds it. This rim of normal tissue, referred to as the surgical margin, is examined by a pathologist. If it is found to be intact, with no cancerous cells reaching to its edges, the margin is considered negative, clear, or clean, and the surgery is considered successful.
Before
On the monitor
the moonscape
of my sister’s tissue
pans across
in shades of grey.
This is the moment
before. After
comes quickened
breath, a tiny
grenade of tears,
its pin unpulled
at the back of my throat,
the silent look
we pass between us
to decide it’s time to
call our mother.
After, needles and blood
and gauze and waiting
and waiting to learn
the severity of what
they will soon begin
to call The Mass.
But in this, the moment
before, they etch
into me the smoky
terrain of her interior
so I can walk it
again later, alone.
The Irises
At attention
on the table, irises
hold tablets of sulphur
on their tongues. We’ve eaten
the bread out of the kitchen
and the eggs
have all been cracked, the little
bowls of their shells
filled with garbage.
Maybe it’s true, somewhere
there are still thunderstorms,
and maybe there will be
other summers for drowning.
No one hears me say
every wall in this house
is pimpled with tumors.
No one hears me say
I know the sky is not falling.
It is lowering itself slowly
down on top of us.
In Your Image
Two thin robes, one
like a coat, the other
backwards, to cover
the crack of the first.
My purse, odd
on my lap,
my winter boots
comically huge
at the ends of my legs.
In the picture they take,
no boots, no
purse, no robe, only
a grey and white
web on the lightbox.
I am the grey
that blocks the light
in the picture that confirms
I am made, made
of the same dying stuff.
Clean Margins
We come-to with a knot tied above our nipple,
a little lock installed atop our breast. They say that
we are mended, but now no person batters. Heart,
a hollow drum, knocks its rhythmic habit in our chest.
The room where we come-to, a sterile moat, skin
painted antiseptic pink, and in twilight sleep, God
seems like a microbe, disinfected out of reach. Nurse,
we say, the word a biopsy, a test of what was taken.
Margins clean, she tells us, and we imagine remission
as the absence of opinion, a future without comment.
To be the cleanest copy of ourselves, history erased.
How now to read the body? From our center, sealed
with suture, what story was evicted? What character
killed off? We marshal the remainder, touch where
we are numb, taut flesh unfamiliar, say Nurse again,
having already forgotten. Margins clean, she repeats,
this time with less kindness. The anesthetic loosening,
we grasp that -ectomy is the suffix form of emptiness,
a wide-open door that all our beginnings and endings
rush out of, light like garbage lifted on an updraft,
spiraling weightless toward another world.
Irradiation
1.
I lie on the table
I try to be still
My breast exposed
to the room, a vague
current of air
across my burnt skin
I watch the machine
squint at me
its crosshairs narrowing
I feel through my stillness
my blood
vibrate through me
This is how I know
I am living
2.
I lie on the table
I try to remember
the name of someone
who loves me
outside these lead walls
down the stairs that led me here
or anything about
that world beyond
the automatic doors
where invalids sun themselves
their IV sacs
heavy with sap
my brethren
deeper inside this
than I
3.
I lie on the kitchen floor
after
after thinking
why not just lie down here?
I watch
my veined hand
at the end of my arm throb
and I quietly want
to keep on living
as things do keep on
Dying isn’t easy
It’s something you have to practice
every day
until finally
one day
you get it right
Love Letter from My Body
My complaints won’t bend your ears. I gave up
care and took medicine,
prudently poisoning the flesh that’s left. My skin
gives off heat tonight, inscribed
with the cold calligraphy of scars. Stop. Let me be
naked in front of you a while,
while I am living. Please look at me while I am here.
Find a place to write your name,
to leave some mark here of our happiness. I want to be
transfigured by your love,
not just by my suffering.
Convalescence
They bring their best love to your deathbed,
float you on a fog of love and medicine.
To their great relief, you survive the cure.
They take you home and swaddle you, reborn.
You wake daily. You walk garbage out to the curb
with care, the task of your continuance now yours
alone again. Phones quiet, tethers slacken.
At the window, you watch the morning fog thin.
The wind lifts it away lightly like a scrim and
blows a nest out of the cedars without a sound.
Amen
This is evidence of
my weakness.
The welt in my hand
where breakfast burned.
The mountain, already
a crust. Hard frost.
The trees are vertical.
To make a point?
The black-eyed susans
have only their black eyes left.
The gnawed tip of a raccoon’s
tail.
An attack, an injury.
And yet in October
I begin to believe
it is all possible again.
Abby Paige
Abby Paige’s writing has appeared in the U.S. and Canada, in publications including Arc Poetry Magazine, Room Magazine, The Montreal Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Résonance. Her previous chapbook, Other Brief Discourses, was published by above/ground press. Born and raised in northern Vermont, she currently resides in the Canadian Maritimes.