3/7/04
do you remember back when we were seventeen
(so long ago, so long)
and all we wanted was legitimate heartbreak?
Our youth was just a vaguer struggle
to lose dramatically what we didn't have
in order to punctuate our sentimental souls.
When mothers' cancer grows, it is a bulbous blot
to cut away, cut away.
It was so much harder to lose the ovaries, the womb:
the empty potential,
than tiny sandpaper tumors we never wanted.
If we could file us down, we would be
empty spaces we could fill
with the aptitude of more.
You know, I could almost forget
how easily a poison is transubstantiated into life,
how a space is missed more easily than surplus:
we don't ever want to see ourselves whole, no,
we always want to see us
at the brink of being more.
copyright Diana Gauvin 2004.