All the Years—Those Mothers to Months, Weeks, and Hours—
Since I Discovered the Black Line that Looked Like Dirt Nestled into My Right Earlobe
by Phyllis Klein
all those years, months, weeks, and hours
I have had a life because that black widow of cancer—
fed from too much sun on my ear day after day,
year after year—was discovered. Found
before it could eat me. Was terminated.
With a scalpel in an operating room,
where a small patch of skin from behind
the ear was sutured onto the cleft left
after removal. What had grown into a dark menace
so near my neck could have spread its web easily
into lymph sponge to travel on, dark mother
of poison. Everything I own today, yesterday,
the day before, is mine because I saw this spot,
brought it to the proper authorities, for biopsy,
for pronouncing it Stage Zero. For removal,
for disposal with its margins wide enough
to ensure they harvested it all. I remember the day
in her office when the surgeon told me
it was gone forever, all its sister cells stopped
from replicating, unlike the stem cells, bone cells,
and skin cells I would keep creating. All the time
I would now get to continue living, moment
to moment with a sense of future, a trip
to the leaf canopies of Central America,
a seventieth birthday dinner, all the meals,
plates of fragrant meat and vegetables, the forks,
spoons, and knives set over their napkins
on the table of my existence.
Photo by Renate Köppel.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: As I thought about a good memory to write about, that moment in the doctor’s consultation office, post-surgery, when she told me my biopsy was clear, popped up vividly. As with many of the other poems I’ve read and admired in this series, my good memory is tied to trauma. But there is something very healing about focusing in on the relief of a disaster averted.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Phyllis Klein is a psychotherapist and poetry therapist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently The Comstock Review, Mad Swirl, and Live Encounters. She has won several finalist awards, and has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. Her book, The Full Moon Herald, was 2021 finalist in the Eric Hoffer awards. She hosts Poets in Conversation, a Zoom reading series started during the Pandemic. Find her online at phyllispoetry.com