“The Hard Burn of Traveling Light,” by Christa Romanosky
“They cut off my mother’s breast at 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, and from the lobby, we watch the low-res screen in the waiting room, color-coded for which stage of surgery she is currently in.”
“They cut off my mother’s breast at 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, and from the lobby, we watch the low-res screen in the waiting room, color-coded for which stage of surgery she is currently in.”
Abu Anis and Abu Alaa insisted, peeling back the mink blankets and lifting their mother between them. She was crying as they carried her out, and I was on the verge of tears, too, glaring intently into the cross-stitch project on my lap.
The hoopla of the morning sun interrupts
a man’s morbidity, doesn’t it?
—It has no capacity
to instruct us, whose hearts grow
irregular.