copyright Robert Wilson

Pucker

The gods line up
to kiss my left breast.
Divine dimples appear
as I raise my left arm.

A star appears
on my windshield too
when a wayward stone
strikes on the expressway,

loud as a gun’s report.
I duck under glass,
wounded again.
Asterisk marks the spot.

I imagine a magical
crystalline fountain
springing out of the ground
and into my chest.

Instead I get
anti-nausea medicines,
a large red syringe
injected so slowly.

My family is grateful
that my car is drivable
and fearful
that I will drive it.

I can still see the road
I tell them,
though another small stone
and I could be shattered.

About This Poem:

Note: This is an excerpt from my memoir. For a more in-depth essay about how writing this poem healed me, see “Healers Write/Writers Heal.”

Nine months after finishing my cancer treatments, I felt strong enough to go to a one-day writing retreat sponsored by Peter Murphy. It was facetiously called a Quickie Retreat because it was held in a hotel. The format was similar to the Winter Getaway. Peter gave the group a prompt and free time to write. After the lunch break, we read our poems and received feedback from Peter and the other participants. The prompt was to write something about a car. The beauty of Peter’s prompts is that they are complex enough to distract my thinking mind, and the unconscious mind can write. I didn’t know that writing about a car would turn out to be my first cancer poem.

The group sat along both sides of a rectangular conference table. There was a bright window behind Peter, who sat at the head. Two molded plastic chairs had been brought in to accommodate more people. Fourteen people sat around a table for twelve. I had my favorite pen in my right hand. I may have clicked it nervously as I waited for my turn to read.

Many conference rooms are dark and dismal, but this one was bright and uplifting. Only a couple of faces stood out to me. A woman with short dark hair and thick black glasses sat about four people to my left. I remember her because she admired a specific line of the poem after I read it. And another woman to my right. We’d met at the previous January retreat.

“Did you submit that piece you wrote for publication?”

“No,” I said. “I’m working on a longer piece, and I’m going to incorporate it there.”

“Well, I hope it gets published somewhere,” she said. “It was really good.” Her poem was a brave poem about a tense relationship with her husband.

When it was my turn to read, my voice started out strong, but it cracked, and I had difficulty finishing through my tears. I was surprised and embarrassed. I don’t like being blindsided by my emotions. I’m always supposed to be in control of them. How could my body betray me like this again?

The retreat gave me the structure I needed to write the poem. I had to get something down on paper. I had a prompt and some emotional distance from the events. Like my poem, “Specific Gravity,” this poem helped me see how fragile and vulnerable I still felt.

This poem first appeared in FINDINGS, Volume 20, 2011. This was an annual publication of the AtlantiCare Department of Medical Education. It was a labor of love by the late Victor Bressler, MD, for whom the Residency Clinic is named.