Mon Petit Pois

NaPoWriMo April 22: “Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which the speaker is in dialogue with him or herself.”

I’m not entirely comfortable posting this, but if it gets you to check your breasts—or have someone else get checked—then it will be worth it. The short of it is that I was diagnosed with breast cancer last October and, so far, so good, thanks to early detection.

“a diagnosis / is an ending / to the idea that / we are not human”
from Bettina Judd’s “Patient”

Mon Petit Pois
by Elizabeth Boquet

Routine mammogram. Anomaly.
Mammogram again. Biopsy.
I see what they mean by a “little pea,”
cozy in the sea of my warm breast,
snug between milky layers
that nourished my babies for years,
unaware of my prayers for it never to exist.

Surgery. Hemorrhage. Surgery again.
They say, “We got it all. We’re sure.
But just in case                 radiation.”
I ask a casketful of questions
before reconnoitering with the lifeguards
who will beam on me every day, name
them Bertha Beam, Gladys Gantry,
and MLC Mabel, my back flat on black
plastic in the white room of bright lights.

Round and round they go. Will they stop
all growth? Nobody knows. I breathe deep,
hold tight and dive within to swim
with Eggemoggin the seal. Day after day,
starfish wave and lobsters clickety-clack
their claws in applause as we beat the heat,
swirl thru the cool blue sea inside of me.

A page from a book made by my mother, Eve Cassatt, for our daughter, Olivia, about a baby seal named Eggemoggin who visited Heart Island, Maine. True story.