Mapmaker
from The Body Geographic, a collection of essays and poetry
Honorary Mention at Sebastopol Center for the Arts "Not Just Landscapes" exhibition
Curator: Robin Dintiman

All across her body are signposts
Down her torso weaves a long scar at the juncture
Where ribs separate and the body becomes soft and round
The scar disappears just below her navel
A train track
 
On her hip a sliver the size of a tiny railroad crossing
An inch across the throat a thin-lipped half-moon
Above the left collarbone, a naked river
Two small crosses bridge the top of an arch
An inch mile-marker carves a groove in the groin
Another hails its salutation at the top of the thigh
 
Cancer didn’t form her but carved a map on a scatter of bromeliads
Floating in space above drifting desert sands
Before the disease called by the name of a man
Not her father staked its claim and snaked its invasion
Through the isthmus and tributaries of her lymph glands
 
The only roots she had known were unplanted
Unpalpable on their airborne journey
Unlike the first lump in her neck
 
At nineteen, infected by cancer, injected by heroin
By a white-coated nurse who pricked her skin into silence
The stitches and scars of outrageous fortune
With her father by the bedside with unseeing eyes
Pain rebelled, erupting in visions of showers
Gashouses behind closed lids
The cremetoria of her ancestors
 
Hospital
Holocaust
Hallucination
Hailing from Eastern Europe
The clandestine birthplace of her forebears
As yet uncharted
Except in dreams
 
An unconscious monument
To the tune of the unknown Jewish daughter
On a landscape of shifting clouds