Laid we down in snow. Aurora more luminous
through phones, shifting in the lens like chartreuse
chiffon over the river. Sly as a striptease, or fear
of a new tumor shimmering in the ultrasound screen.
Below us, bubbles sketched in thick dark ice. Held
river-breath. At the clinic someone’s mother rests
like a tongue in the MRI’s maw. Her magnetic field
spins and spins. Mine stays still for several seconds.
Blood work? I sure hope it does. Between bandages,
pics of the new scar bordering my areola. Sent
captioned: lol they Jokerfied my tit. Purple grin
puckering unfamiliar skin. If not mine, then
whose? Snow-blind to history, I observe photos
of my grandmothers with the same dutiful lack
of recognition as when stumbling across my own
old nudes. I’ve often wished for spoons to scoop
the eggs out of my belly all at once like salmon roe.
Framed on the hospital wall, a virgin forest, forever
bodacious with snow. Where you and I made angels
under alien light, the Huron’s banks have melted
back to mud. To walk safely over that frozen river
had made our whole lives possible. All the long spring
in arboretums and meadows, silver pathways shone
where our past selves strode. The hard-packed ice
under our feet was strongest—so the last to go. 
 

—Rebecca Hawkes

Poet’s Website, Instagram

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