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.