Lineage

There is an irretrievable space between

ordinary Sunday moments and un-ordinary,

spoken truths:

metastasis, stage 4, terminal.

I sit at a lip of the Atlantic,

watching waves come and go

like people with their chemo bags at the clinic—

fill, empty; flow, ebb; fill, empty.

As one blue crest reaches toward me,

another blackens and recedes.

My beloved aunt has a beach rose-sized mass

inside her collapsed lung,

like my mother had a periwinkle shell

inside her left breast,

like my grandmother had a golf ball

inside her right breast.

“I’ve lived a blessed life,” my aunt said

last night and, paired with the last minute

trip to the ocean, I knew what this meant.

It was midnight. The gulls were silent.

Now, it is morning.

Sand skitters across the beach

and falls into lines like nervous children.

Across the washboard, crab legs

lay like amputations, or glitter

from a child’s birthday party.

How inconsiderate and poetic life is:

my baby sleeps in the cottage bedroom

while my dying aunt pours coffee in the kitchen

while I sit on dune grass contemplating how both

love and pain proliferate like malignant cells.

The word cancer is a Latin translation

of the Greek word for crab,

but how unlike the cautious, side-stepping

crustacean it is—

so brazenly clearing out the lungs and breasts

and lines of women who raised me.

As I sit on the seawall made to prevent

storms from encroaching on fertile land,

I finger a sand dollar the size of my nipple

and place my hand over my womb,

returning to the body

from which I descended,

from which I reproduced.

Beyond the beach, a legacy of tides

recycles the same story:

my baby wakes,

my aunt takes us to breakfast,

and then—pressed together like archive pages—

we say goodbye, again.