Poetry & Art
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Clean Margins

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.

Clean Margins_Final.jpg

Cover art: “Untitled”

Artist: Lydia Humphreys

Click here for more information about the artist.


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

  1. Biopsy 1

  2. Before

  3. The Irises

  4. In Your Image

  5. Clean Margins

  6. Irradiation

  7. Love Letter from My Body

  8. Convalescence

  9. Amen

  10. 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.

 
 


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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.

 
 

 
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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.


Acknowledgements 

“The Irises” originally appeared in carte blanche.

“The Irises” and “Clean Margins” are included in Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology, edited by Priscila Uppal and Meaghan Strimas, published by Mansfield Press.



Clean Margins

Copyright © 2020 Abby Paige

Cover art: “Untitled” by Lydia Humphreys.

Cover design by Luke Blevins.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or republished without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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