to trace the roots of my cancer through the labyrinth
of my mother’s genome.
Call it fish, thread a needle, stitch
through its fat greasy scales. This slippery disease
I have tried to write
into a beautiful life, a horse that ran
on a shattered ankle, striking white of bone fragments
in dirt. I have lint
in my throat like something has been
nesting in my sleep. The dust knows more about me
than anyone alive.
Entropy move in slow diagonals and
nothing in me opens the way it used to. Under a ceiling
stained with the shape
of a country I once meant to visit,
a single glass on the table might be all that’s left of me,
still half-full with March.
–
Rowan Tate is a Romanian creative and curator of beauty. Her writing appears in The Stinging Fly, The Shore, Josephine Quarterly, and Meniscus Literary Journal, among others. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.