Elegy for My Left Breast
/You first emerged, twinning your sister—
two small bumps, dark pink and sore,
pressing against my flannel pajama top.
I covered you both with a flat, triangle
training bra and waited. You rose
to fill your shape—teardrops, round-
bottomed, small and firm. Unobtrusive,
you stayed in place, fit under clothing, spent
your prime cupped in warm hands, traced by
fingertips that found your sister’s lump.
Cross-hatched by scalpels, burned by radiation,
your twin went dormant, while you faithfully
grew with pregnancy, persisted through low
flow—wet tea bags on your cracked nipple,
pump sucking your spray every two hours.
Your drizzle consoled my son for three years,
then, you dried up overnight—task completed.
Now, after forty-seven years, you’ve reached
your end. Tomorrow morning, they’ll take you,
in this second round, take your nipple, too.
I wonder where you’ll go. I’m told slices of you
will remain encased between thin glass strips,
stored in a lab—relics in a museum of aberrations.
The rest, I imagine, will flame to ash.
Author’s Note: As a two-time breast cancer survivor and 23-year cancer patient, I think and write a lot about my experiences with serious illness, my transforming body, and the medical industry. This poem emerged on the eve of my mastectomy, when I was considering the life of my left breast across four decades. The poem insisted on couplets, with staggered beginnings and endings.
Bio: Melissa Joplin Higley is the author of First Father (Bottlecap Press) and We Shake & Seek (Origami Poems Project). Grand Prize winner of the 90th Annual Writer's Digest Writing Competition, her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, B_O_D_Y, Broadsided, Crab Orchard Review, the Hudson River Museum, The Penn Review, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. Melissa holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, edits book reviews for MER-Mom Egg Review, and serves as the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY, where she lives with her multi-generational family and four tuxedo cats. Find her online at melissajoplinhigley.com.
